Xavier
by TheManFromMudos
Summary: 23 years after the Constantinople disaster, Matthew & Xena, along with their newest tagalong, Katie, and two children, Xavier & Amanda, awake from hypersleep above Manchester, Sedna. They soon discover that the world they left behind has very much disappeared, and the Solar System will never be the same again. But can the group find solace aboard the Roaming Colony Ship Angelica?
1. Chapter 1

**ONE of THIRTY-TWO**

*NOTE- Hello, everybody! It's me, TheManFromMudos, and guess what? It is time, ladies and gentlemen. Matthew is _back_. Xena is _back_. Katie is _back_. Although, she was only in the last story for three chapters, so you're probably not that interested in her. For now. Yes, after a long month of careful planning, meticulous structuring and quite a lot of head-scratching, I have finally fixed in place the foundations of the final chapter in the 'Xena' trilogy. Now, some of you may be disappointed that this is the last story in the series. But don't worry. Methinks there _might_ be a prequel on the horizon. And anyway, this one should keep you busy for a few months (or days, if you're reading this at some point in the future when the whole thing's done.) Anyway, I'm not going to spoil anything for you. I'll just leave you to sink your teeth into it. All I will tell you is that this is by far my most ambitious story yet. So, read on and enjoy. For the first time, it's 'Xavier'. THANK YOU!*

*DISCLAIMER – Way back when, in the autumn of 1979, that majestic creature known as the Xenomorph graced our screens for the very first time. Now, we've a lot of people to thank for that. Ridley Scott. H.R. Giger. And many more. But one person we _don't_ have to thank for that, is me. Yes, believe it or not, ladies and gentlemen, I did not play any part in the creation of the Alien franchise. So, I think it goes without saying that I do not own, nor have I owned, the rights to the franchise. Just so you know. Oh, there's some other franchises referenced in here as well. I don't own them, either. What I _do_ own is all of the characters in this story, as well as _most_ of the ships. I also own the hand-drawn cover art, which is currently mounted proudly on my bedroom wall. Again, just so you know. THANK YOU!*

 **PROLOGUE**

Xenomorph (XX121) – A deadly, endoparasitoid lifeform with no higher goals other than the propagation of its species. That is the standard by which the Weyland-Yutani Corporation defines a Xenomorph. I should know. I've read several of their case files regarding the species. It all began in 2104, apparently, when a colonisation vessel called the Covenant first discovered the existence of the creature on an uncharted, life-supporting planet whilst en route to its destination on Origae-6. Along with another lifeform referred to in the case files as a 'Neomorph', the bloodthirsty predator all but wiped out the Covenant's skeleton crew. Of course, Weyland-Yutani soon got this crazy idea that these 'mindless' aliens could be easily transformed into biological weapons of mass destruction. Since then, ship after ship has been claimed by the Xenomorphs, as rogue bounty hunters and undercover synthetics bring the killer organism amongst the unwitting crew, hoping to bring it into the hands of the Company. The Copernicus, the Nostromo, the SS Lockley-Lockley, to name but a few, are all such ships, whose crews were completely eradicated by these ruthless carnivores. There's one thing about the Xenomorphs that you can always be certain of: that they will kill _any_ and _all_ other living things that they come into contact with.

 **XAVIER**

Galactic Standard Date/Time Stamp: TWO-THOUSAND THREE-HUNDRED AND FORTY-TWO / SEVEN / THIRTY-ONE

N.X. Tulmorian Public Transportation Vessel Andromeda – Registration Number: 446526331

\- Mainframe AI: Neolith Xerxes Tulmorian Artificial Intelligence Systems Unit 35 – 'Andi'

\- Crew: 1 – Navigational (1)

\- Passengers: 4 – Adult (1), Infant (2), Animal (1 – UNRECOGNISED SPECIES)

Current Assignment: Travel to Manchester, Sedna for relocation of patients from MTAS Constantinople

Expected Time of Arrival: TWO-THOUSAND THREE-HUNDRED AND TWENTY-ONE / SIX / TWENTY-TWO

I hate hypersleep. Most people will tell you that you get used to it eventually. But I beg to differ. Throughout my life, I've collectively spent more than fifty years in hypersleep. Chronologically, therefore, I've lived for well over seventy years, despite the fact that I'm only physically in my late twenties. And yet, after all these years, I still can't safely say that I am 'used to' hypersleep. Thankfully, I don't get 'stasis sickness', which is more than can be said for a lot of people. But I always end up waking up so… tired. Technically, you are neither asleep nor awake whilst in hypersleep, which would explain why, after an eighteen-month period in stasis, for example, you wake up feeling like you haven't slept in… well, eighteen months. So, naturally, when I awoke from a near two-year stint in hypersleep aboard the NXTPTV Andromeda, I was feeling pretty knackered. The moment I opened my eyes, I immediately wanted to close them again. But, seeing as though I _was_ the ship's only crew member (albeit not one of its _own_ crew members), I knew that it was my duty to be up and ready before the passengers were awoken. Drearily lifting my heavy arms from by my sides, I reached out to the two handles on the inside of the hypersleep booth, and pulled back the thick glass casing over my head.

Sitting up groggily, I rubbed my weary eyes and looked around the dimly lit room I had just spent the last twenty-four months asleep in. It was a tiny little chamber, to be sure. Basic crew quarters, four to a room. I saw that the other three hypersleep booths around me were still occupied. The others had not yet been awoken. Katie. Xena. Xavier and Amanda. Together, we made up the rag-tag crew of the Andromeda. But not for much longer. Soon, we'd touch down in the sleepy village of Manchester, on the dwarf planet Sedna. Far, far away from the heart of human civilisation. There, Xena and I could start a new life together, away from the prying eye of the discriminative public. Before any of that, though, we'd have to make our landing.

"Andi?" I called out hoarsely into the silent room, stretching my arms out into the air as I did so.

" _Konbanwa, Mashuu-san._ " A chirpy, disembodied voice replied loudly. It belonged to Andi, the Japanese-speaking AI mainframe of the Andromeda.

"Shit. Forgot about that." I muttered, trying to translate a coherent sentence in my head. "Um… _Ima nanji dess ka, Andi?_ "

" _Juu-hachii-ji san juu-pun dess._ " She replied cheerily. Eighteen-thirty. With luck, we could touch down on Sedna before the day was out.

" _Hokanohito o mezame sasete kudasai, Andi._ " I continued, slowly climbing out of the hypersleep booth and flicking on a nearby light switch.

" _Mondai arimasen._ " Andi agreed. " _Chottomatte kudasai._ " Suddenly, the other hypersleep booths in the room began to whir gently, springing to life as their occupants were slowly reanimated. Air hissed through the vents on the foot end of each pod as they were repressurised, their contents being exposed to 'fresh' air for the first time in two years. Eventually, the hissing subsided, and the interior of each booth was bathed in pale blue light.

" _Subete no joukyaku wa me o samashite imass._ " Andi assured me, as the small dials on the side of each booth clicked into the 'vacant' position in unison.

" _Arigatou gozaimass._ " I replied, walking over to the nearest booth. I peered down through the thick glass casing and saw a young woman in her late twenties, perhaps a year or two younger than myself. This was Katie, single mother of one and the only adult human passenger aboard the ship.

"Katie? Can you hear me?" I asked quietly, rapping gently on the glass with the knuckle of my forefinger. She opened her eyes wearily, slowly craning her neck to see who had woken her up. When her gaze fell upon me, she smiled weakly, and attempted to speak, before coughing violently.

"Hold on." I said, lifting the lid of the booth open for her. As Katie sat up, still coughing, I began to swiftly strike her across the back with one hand.

"Thanks." She mumbled as her coughing subsided. She smiled weakly once again, her face incredibly pale.

"You alright?" I asked, rubbing her back gently as she continued to breathe heavily.

"Yeah." She replied, nodding hesitantly. Her face certainly said otherwise.

"Are you sure?" I insisted. I wasn't going to risk her throwing up all over the place. Blood and gore was one thing, but I couldn't stomach vomit.

"No." She muttered, her smile suddenly falling. I immediately reached down to a small shelf on the underside of the hypersleep booth, and pulled out a small plastic container, which I thrust into Katie's hands just in time. I turned away as she began to retch violently.

"I'm going to check on the others." I told her, quickly moving away as she continued to heave loudly. I walked over to the next booth along, and gazed upon its dormant inhabitant. She was tall. She was slender. She was black. And I don't mean dark-skinned, I mean she was quite literally _black_.

The inhabitant in question was, of course, Xena. My eight-foot tall, heavily-armoured killing machine of a girlfriend. She could snap a man in two like a dry reed. She could punch through a ribcage with nothing but her tongue. She could even survive in the vacuum of space. And yet, in many ways, she was as soft as a brush. Xena wouldn't hurt a fly, much less a human. For although she may have had the body of a killer, Xena was far from that. Quite the opposite, in fact. She'd saved my life on a couple of occasions, as well as the lives of our other passengers. Yes, believe it or not, Xena was much more accustomed to being on the receiving end of violence than she was to dealing it out. As I stared down into the pod, I thought about everything that Xena and I had been through together. Murder, blackmail, betrayal. And that was just on the Archimedes. Then, on the Constantinople, our own son had tried to kill us. With a bit of luck, though, things could soon change. We could live in peace here on Sedna. We could be happy.

"Xena..." I whispered, lifting the lid of the hypersleep booth and stroking the top of her head gently. "Are you awake, Zee?" She nodded her head slowly, although the size of the pod was so inadequate that she had barely a couple of inches to move around in.

"Do you feel alright?" I asked, carefully helping her sit up. After a long pause, she slowly shook her head from side to side.

"Makes sense." I muttered. "You've only been under once before, and you were dead at the time." I chuckled, as did she.

"Don't worry." I assured her. "You'll be right as rain in a couple of hours." She smiled slightly, and heaved a deep sigh. I reached out with both arms, and she leaned in to embrace me in a hug, I gently stroked her smooth carapace as she rested her head over my shoulder. She sighed again, but when she eventually pulled herself away from me, her expression was much less troubled. Despite everything we'd been through getting here, at least we were together. It might not have been all that mattered, but it was certainly a comforting thought. And one we had to hold onto in these stressful times.

"Matthew?" Katie suddenly called out from the far side of the room. I looked around to see her stood beside the final hypersleep booth. In her arms, she gently cradled her infant daughter, Amanda. She gestured towards the pod as I approached. I leaned over the side and saw another baby, also newborn, who was sound asleep, breathing lightly. The adopted child of Xena and I. Xavier. I lifted the child out of the hypersleep booth carefully, rocking him back and forth in my arms. Technically, hypersleep was unsafe for minors. But we hadn't exactly been given much choice in the matter.

"Is he alright?" Katie asked, still quietly tending to her own baby. I looked down at Xavier with a smile, and nodded as I stroked the top of his head.

"He's fine." I told her. "Thankfully." She nodded in agreement. I glanced over at Xena, who seemed reluctant to move from her hypersleep booth. Perhaps she simply needed a few minutes to relax her aching muscles. I didn't envy her, having to squeeze into a pod just over half her size. But, once again, we didn't really have the luxury of choice when we were fleeing a collapsing space station. We just had to make the best of a difficult situation.

"So how close are we, then?" Katie enquired. "A few hours? Couple of days?"

"I'll ask." I told her, trying to correctly phrase a question in Japanese off the top of my head. " _Andi, Manchesstaa to no kyori wa?_ "

" _Watashtachi wa Manchesstaa, Sedona kara juu-ni OA tan'i hanarete iru._ " Andi replied. " _Yaku san-jikan de touchaku shimass._ "

"What did she say?" Katie demanded before Andi had even finished her sentence.

"We're about three hours away." I explained. "We'll be there before nightfall. Mind you, I don't know what the local time is."

"And what's today's date?" Katie asked, keen to get the answers she wanted right off the bat."

"An excellent question, Katie." I replied jokingly. "I shall find out at once. _Andi, kyou no hidzuke wa nandess ka?_ "

" _ni-sen san-hyaku yon-juu-ni nen nanagatsu san-juu-ichi nichi dess._ " The ever-cheerful Andi told me.

"What did she say?" Katie said again. She really did need to work on her patience.

"She said it's the thirty-first of July." I assured her calmly. "Twenty-three... Wait a minute. _Andi, nan-nen dess ka?_ "

" _Ni-sen san-hyaku yon-juu-ni nen dess._ " She repeated. My face fell as I translated each word individually in my head.

"What did she say?" Katie asked yet again. "Is there something wrong, Matthew? Is it not the thirty-first of July?"

"Oh no, it's the thirty-first of July." I assured her, staring blankly off into space as I did so. "Twenty-three forty two."

"I beg your pardon?" She snapped, both astonished and dismayed by the number that she had just heard.

"The year…" I repeated slowly, turning to face her and sighing deeply. "Is twenty-three forty-two."


	2. Chapter 2

**TWO of THIRTY-TWO**

"I don't believe this." Katie snapped angrily. Apparently, she wasn't taking the news too well. "I thought you knew what you were doing!"

"And what's that supposed to mean?" I asked, trying to remain calm. Of course I knew what I was doing. I was a Navigational Officer, for God's sake!

"What do you think it means, Matthew?" She retorted. "In case you haven't noticed, we've been in hypersleep for… twenty-three years! You said it'd take _two_ years to get here. Two! So please, Matthew, tell me, what part of this suggests any sort of competence on your side?"

"We ran the calculations, Katie." I insisted impatiently. "An ETA of the 22nd of June, 2321at a speed of Light-12. You _cannot_ blame me for this."

"Then who can I blame?" She demanded cockily, staring at me coldly as she spoke. "Hmm? Your little Japanese friend, perhaps?"

"She's not my friend…" I began, my voice rising in volume as I spoke. "She's the ship's computer and it's not my fault she doesn't speak English!"

Suddenly, a deafening roar erupted from the corner of the room. Katie and I immediately fell silent as the bellowing growl continued. I swiveled on my heels to see Xena standing at the foot of her hypersleep booth, bearing her teeth as she growled angrily. I looked back at Katie, who seemed both terrified and fascinated by Xena's outburst. Being so unused to seeing Xena behave so…primitively, I found myself feeling the same odd mixture of emotions. She was a formidable woman, and no mistake. Finally, she stopped growling, but continued to scowl at the two of us in discontent.

"Sorry, Zee." I mumbled, feeling guilty that I had caused her upset. "And I'm sorry, Katie. I shouldn't have gotten so worked up over nothing."

"No, it's my fault." Katie insisted humbly. "You're right, Matthew. I can't blame you for this. I just… it's shocked me, that's all."

"I know." I replied sympathetically. I suppose I couldn't really blame her for being upset. She'd been away from home for over two decades. Worst of all, she'd spent those two decades in stasis aboard a foreign ship with a strange man she'd never met before and an admittedly terrifying alien.

"We'll get to the bottom of this." I assured Katie, still trying to calm her nerves. "And if you're really that bothered about Andi speaking Japanese, I'll see if there's anything I can do about it."

"Thanks." She mumbled in response, smiling apologetically as she spoke.

" _Andi…_ " I called out once again, attempting to interface with the ever-present mainframe. " _Intaafeisu gengo o henkou suru koto wa kanou desska?_ "

" _Mochiron._ " Andi replied affirmatively. " _Watash no gengo deitabeisu ni wa, Afurikaansu-go, Arubania-go, Amuhara-go, Arabia-go, Arumenia-go, A-_ "

" _Eigo de onegaishimass._ " I interrupted. We could have been there for hours otherwise.

" _Naruhodo._ " She said chirpily. " _Watash wa Eigo no tame ni san-juu no kekka ga arimass. Iokasute no Eigo, Kasei no Eigo, Rishitea no Eigo, S-_ "

" _Igirisu no Eigo!_ " I snapped. Dear God, how many dialects of the English language could there be? I never even knew that they spoke it on Iocaste.

" _Hijou ni yoku._ " Andi agreed. " _Chottomatte kudasai._ " Then, she fell silent for several moments. I glanced at Katie, who simply shrugged her shoulders, then at Xena, who seemed equally confused. A few more moments later, though, Andi finally spoke again.

"Default language set to English (UK)." She announced. I think she had the same voice as before, as I could still detect a slight East Asian accent coming through as she spoke. As long as Katie and Xena could understand her, though, it didn't matter.

"Thank you very much, Andi." I beamed, looking over at Katie with a smug grin on my face. "Happy now?"

"I'll be _happy_ , Matthew…" She replied, unimpressed. "When we figure out why we've been in hypersleep for twenty-three years."

"Alright!" I exclaimed sarcastically. "All in good time. Andi, perhaps you could explain. Why have we arrived at Sedna in twenty-three forty-two and not twenty-three twenty-one as planned?"

"I believe I can explain." She explained. "As I explained before you went into hypersleep, I explained that the explosion of the Constantinople caused some damage to my systems. I explained that the air ventilation system had suffered some damage, which, as I explained, had also affected the-"

"Andi…" I interrupted, already becoming annoyed by her unnecessary repetition. "Andi? You don't have to say 'explained' so much."

"My apologies, sir." She replied. "I've never spoken English before. It may take a while for me to get used to it."

"No problem." I assured her. "Just… try not to use the same verb over and over again."

"Understood." Andi assured me. "And if there are any other issues with my grammar, please don't hesitate to let me know."

"Anyway…" Katie said impatiently, urging us back towards the topic at hand. "What were you saying about the damage, Andi?"

"Ah, yes." She replied hastily. "As I was saying, the damage from the explosion of the Constantinople seemed minor at first. Unfortunately, after you had all gone into hypersleep, I ran some further diagnostics and discovered that the ship's hyperdrive had been all but destroyed in the blast."

"Wait, the hyperdrive was destroyed?" Katie repeated. "Do you mean to say…? Matthew, does she mean to say…"

"Yes, she means to say." I nodded solemnly. "We've been traveling at _less_ than the speed of light for this entire journey. Haven't we, Andi?"

"That is correct, sir." Andi replied. "Light-0.96, to be exact. This was the fastest the Andromeda could travel without breaking the light barrier."

"And you never thought to wake us up and tell us about this?" I asked. Surely she'd realised at some point that things weren't right.

"I was given a direct order, sir, by you, to awake you and your passengers when, and only when, we arrived at our destination." She explained.

"Yes, but I would've thought you'd've made an exception when we passed our expected arrival date and were still 21 light years away from Sedna." I remarked, annoyed (and for the record, yes, I did just use the word 'you'd've', and no, I'm not going to apologise for it).

"As I said, sir, I was given a strict order." Andi repeated. "You asked me to awake you when we arrived at our destination, not when we reached the expected arrival date." I heaved a deep sigh and shook my head in disappointment. I couldn't believe this. Then again, it was typical, really, and probably to be expected of an N.X. Tulmorian system. Damn Russians and their efficient, perfectly obedient machines.

"So that's it then, is it?" Katie remarked glumly. "Twenty-one years behind schedule and all she has to say is 'I was given an order'?"

"She's a computer, Katie." I replied. "She only did as she was told." Admittedly, though, I shared her sentiment. Andi could have taken emergency measures. She could have woken us back up as soon as she realised the hyperdrive was damaged. Fair enough, we might have been ill for weeks as a result of such a short period in stasis. But at least we wouldn't have ended up in this dire situation, would we?

I looked over at Katie, who was leaned against a hypersleep booth with her infant daughter in her arms. She had a troubled look in her eyes, almost verging on tears. For me, it didn't really matter how long we'd been away. Now that I had Xena, I had no intention of going back to my home on Earth, anyway. But for Katie, things were different. She had friends and family on Sedna. Her closest acquaintances were now twenty-three years older than her. Her brothers and sisters, if indeed she had any. The father of her child. They had all aged well past her by now. Not to mention how much society could've changed in that time. Again, I was used to being out of the loop for years on end, but Katie? Her world had been turned upside down by this.

"Are you alright?" I asked, drifting over and leaning back against the hypersleep booth beside her.

"I'm fine." She assured me, although she clearly wasn't. "What's twenty-three years, anyway? At least most of the people I know _might_ still be alive."

"Hey, calm down…" I said warmly, placing a hand on her shoulder as tears began to stream down her face. "Don't cry." Of course, telling somebody not to cry is generally _not_ an effective way to stop them from crying. I quickly took my arm away from Katie, and gently lifted the baby from her arms. After carefully laying the infant down in the open hypersleep booth behind us, I stretched my arms out towards her, offering her a comforting embrace. She continued to weep as I put my arms around her, hugging her tightly in her time of distress. I could only imagine how badly this had affected her.

For several long moments, I continued to hold Katie close as she cried. Finally, her tears subsided, and soon she was calm again. Relatively speaking. I gently released my arms from around her, stepping back slowly. She still appeared distressed, but significantly less so than before.

"Alright now?" I asked. She nodded slowly, and gave me a sad smile. I returned the smile, trying to lift the mood a little. Then, I looked over at Xena, and my smile quickly fell. She stared at me coldly, both annoyed and slightly taken aback. I'd been so worried about Katie, I hadn't even considered what Xena might have thought.

"I'm sorry, Zee." I said apologetically. I walked over to her and attempted to embrace her in a hug. She stepped back as I did so, and turned her back to me.

"Xena…" I tried again, stepping closer. "Come on now…" I slowly reached one arm around her back, resting my head against her arm. She continued to give me the cold shoulder for several moments, but eventually looked me in the eyes with an indifferent expression on her face.

"I was only trying to keep her spirits up, Zee." I explained, keeping my voice low so that Katie wouldn't overhear me. "She's lost everything, you know." Xena nodded slowly, understanding of Katie's situation. She smiled weakly, as if apologising for her overreaction. I held my arms out to offer her a hug, which she graciously accepted. A sigh of relief washed over me knowing that I was forgiven. Perhaps I had overdone it a little bit with Katie just then.

"Now," I announced, releasing my embrace around Xena. "Before we land, there are a couple of things you need to know, alright?" She nodded solemnly, although I got the sense she was also quite intrigued by my remark. I just wanted to make sure that she was prepared for life on Sedna.

"Things are going to be very different once we get there." I explained, stroking the back of her hand as I spoke. "You've never set foot on solid ground before, and it's not like being up here on a ship. There's real air, real gravity. Plants and animals everywhere. It might unnerve you at first, but… I think you're going to like it here." I smiled warmly as I spoke, gazing into Xena's empty face. She smiled back, clearly looking forward to 'planet' life. Admittedly, I was looking forward to it too. It had been more than a few years since I had last set foot on good old-fashioned soil and rock.

"I've never been to Sedna before," I continued, sighing. "But from what Katie's told me, this village is a nice, quiet little place. Hopefully it hasn't changed much while we've been away."

"I wouldn't be so sure of that." Katie announced. I turned to see that she had opened the door into the corridor, and was stood outside gazing through an enormous window. I marched out into the corridor after her to see what it was that had caught her attention. My face fell as soon as I saw what she had seen.

Through the vast, sweeping window of the corridor, the dwarf planet Sedna stood proud. Although it was nothing more than a large, misshapen rock compared to the Earth, it was still an eponymous sight. And, of course, before extrasolar colonisation took off, it was the furthest human colony from Earth. But that was but a distant memory now. For as I looked out across the surface of the miniscule planet, I saw that those tiny villages, the first settlements of those 21st Century pioneers, had been completely eradicated. Now, the entire planet was covered in bright lights. I looked closer, and saw enormous buildings. Mighty skyscrapers, immense motorways. A concrete jungle. There was not a single inch of untouched ground in sight. In the space of twenty-three years, this distant, mostly rural planet had become a hub of human civilisation. And in that moment, I knew that all hope of Xena and I lying low here, of me protecting her from those who would so easily kill her, had gone. My whole plan had come crashing down like a ton of bricks.

"Andi…" I mumbled, my voice quiet and distant. "Could you please identify our current location?" I refused to accept that this was really the dwarf planet Sedna. It simply couldn't be so.

"Certainly, sir." Andi replied. "We are currently in orbit above the Greater Metropolitan Area of the City of Manchester, Sedna. Estimated local population is approximately… nine million, six-hundred-thousand, with a density of roughly fifty-thousand inhabitants per square kilometre."


	3. Chapter 3

**THREE of THIRTY-TWO**

"Nine million!" I exclaimed, shocked. It was a bit of a leap from just two hundred inhabitants, wasn't it?

"Nine million, _six-hundred-thousand_." Katie remarked, not particularly helping the situation. I wouldn't have expected her to be so… blunt, at a time like this.

"Thanks, Katie." I said sarcastically, rolling my eyes as I did so. "Look, this is just not possible, and you know it's not. A tiny village on the outskirts of the solar system can't become… _that_ in a matter of twenty-three years." I gestured to the city below again, which took up a good quarter of the planet.

"So what are you suggesting?" Katie asked, shrugging her shoulders. "That something happened while we were gone, causing the population to explode?"

"Precisely." I nodded. "This kind of population boom couldn't have happened without some external stimulus. And I intend to find out what that stimulus was. Andi?"

"Yes, Matthew?" Andi replied, her slightly-robotic voice echoing against the walls of the corridor as she spoke.

"Can you tell me the exact date that Manchester became a city?" I asked, determined to get to the bottom of things.

"Certainly, sir." She replied obediently. "The village of Manchester officially became a township on or about the second of October, twenty-three twenty-three, when its population surpassed one-hundred-thousand inhabitants. In twenty-three twenty-five, following mass immigration from the planet Earth, the population soared to over five million people, giving the township _de facto_ city status. The population continued to increase at a drastic rate until the end of the decade, when it leveled out at approximately nine-and-a-quarter million. It has continued to slowly climb since then." This was even more drastic than I could have imagined. Was Andi really trying to tell me that in the space of two years, the population had increased by nearly five million people? And why had so many of them come from Earth? I simply had to know more.

"Why was there mass immigration from Earth, Andi?" I asked. "You said that in twenty-three twenty-five, there was mass immigration from Earth."

"That is correct, sir." She assured me with confidence. "Well, almost correct. Throughout the summer and autumn of the year twenty-three twenty- _four_ , net immigration from Earth was recorded at around forty-three billion, wi-"

"Hold on a minute." I interrupted, not quite sure if I had heard Andi correctly. "Forty-three _billion_? As in, nine zeroes, a _billion_?"

"Yes, sir." She confirmed. "Approximately ninety-seven point two percent of the planet's population at that time." I shook my head with a mocking grin.

"No, no, no…" I began, folding my arms across my chest as I spoke. "You've misread the figures. You must have misread the figures."

"With all due respect, sir…" Andi replied, sounding slightly impatient. "I am a highly advanced artificial intelligence unit with an IQ of over ten thousand. I do not 'misread the figures'. The data _has_ been correctly collated from over three hundred independent population quotas." My face fell as I realised that she was right. No AI could make such a monumental mistake. Which could only mean one thing: that in the summer and autumn of twenty-three twenty-four, almost everyone on the planet just… left. But why? What had happened to the Earth? To my home planet? I was almost too afraid to ask, terrified of what I might hear. But I don't think I could have lived with myself if I hadn't found out that day.

"Andi?" I asked, my voice almost a whisper. "What… What happened? Why did everybody leave Earth?" I suspected that I already knew the answer…

"I believe I have enough data in my records to explain, sir." She replied solemnly. "But you may want to take a seat before I begin."

"On the seventh of July, twenty-three twenty, a seeding ship landed in Dock 17 of the Queen Elizabeth Ship Port, London, England, Earth. The ship had been cleared by both air traffic control and dock staff to make it's landing, despite the fact that neither the crew nor the ship's onboard artificial intelligence system had replied to any of their transmissions. For precautionary reasons, a squad of fully armed security operatives accompanied dock staff as one of the ship's airlocks was opened for inspection. The entire team, seven in all, were killed within seconds of opening the airlock, as two large, heavily-armoured alien creatures burst through the open door. More operatives were scrambled, but by the time they had arrived at the scene, the creatures were long gone. They had fled into the streets of London. The operatives inspected the ship to better understand what had happened to its crew. Four of them were nowhere to be found, and the two that were on board were found dead in their hypersleep booths, both of them with severe injuries to the stomach. In the engine bay, two large, egg-like objects were found, both of which appeared to be open. It was originally thought that the creatures came from the eggs, killed what was left of the ship's crew, and then waited for the ship to reach Earth, possibly for as long as sixteen months.

In the city, panic quickly arose, as the creatures took to the streets, preying on innocent civilians. By the end of the week, over forty people were reported missing or dead. Sightings of the creatures were soon recorded outside of the city centre, as far away as Uxbridge. It was believed that the creatures had reproduced with one another, and that there could now be as many as ten of them at large. By this point, the British government had called on specialists from Kovacs Extrasolar Solutions, the Jupiter Mining Corporation, and the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, all of whom had high-budget biological weapons programs, and all of whom claimed to have never come across such creatures before. Meanwhile, the first sighting of the creature outside of the Greater London Area had been reported all the way over in Bristol. Soon, other cities began to join the list. Sheffield. Coventry. Ely. By this point, the death count was estimated at over five hundred people, and the alien population was estimated to have reached a hundred. Weyland-Yutani labeled the creature as the Xenomorph (XX121), but still maintained that they had never encountered the species before. When the death count hit a thousand, the government became seriously concerned with the 'Xenomorph' threat, and demanded that research continued into wiping them out.

On the nineteenth of August, twenty-three twenty, the situation worsened. A German man was found dead in his home in Düsseldorf, with similar injuries to Xenomorph victims in the UK. A week later, a French woman in Cannes. A Spanish pensioner in Valencia. The whole of Western Europe was lit up with sightings. Thousands were reported dead at the hands of the Xenomorphs, whose population was now estimated at well over three thousand. Local police forces called in military relief, but the creatures were so hard to kill that less than a dozen deceased specimens had been handed over to the researching organisations. Other companies now attempted to assist Kovacs, Weyland-Yutani, and the JMC. N.X. Tulmorian and Ashbridge Industries International were among some of the larger names to join the fight. But still, they were overwhelmed. By the spring of twenty-three twenty-one, reports had been filed in Turkey. Egypt. Afghanistan. The Xenomorphs now occupied the whole of Europe, as well as parts of Africa and Asia. The death count was unprecedented. Mass panic consumed the entire planet. People knew it was only a matter of time before… China, March twenty-three twenty-one. Kenya, March twenty-three twenty-one. South Africa, April twenty-three twenty-one. This was now a matter of _global_ security.

Throughout the rest of the year, deaths continued to crop up across mainland Eurasia and Africa. And then: Japan. Australia. The USA. Populations soared well over a million, with deaths at an estimated five million. They bred like rabbits, and nobody could do a thing to stop them. It appeared that the Earth was fighting a losing battle. Finally, early in twenty-three twenty-two, the tables appeared to be turning. Hundreds of whistleblowers from Weyland-Yutani came forth, revealing that the Company had known of the existence of the Xenomorphs for _centuries_. Ordinarily, the organisation would have been immediately dismantled, for withholding information which could have potentially saved the planet two years earlier. But world governments were now desperate. Brazil, Chile and Argentina had now joined the list of countries occupied by the Xenomorph species. Instead of closing down Weyland-Yutani, they asked for their help. The advice that the Company gave them was something which nobody wished to hear. The Xenomorphs were literally unstoppable in such great numbers. They had killed more people than the Black Death, and over twenty million of them were believed to be roaming the Earth. As Weyland-Yutani told them, there was only one way to eliminate the Xenomorph threat now.

In mid-summer, twenty-three twenty-three, several reports of Xenomorph victims came in from Iceland. It was officially the last country on the planet to succumb to the creatures. People began to flee the planet _en masse_ , desperate to escape the Xenomorphs, lest they themselves fell victim to them. In the winter of that year, world governments finally agreed that Weyland-Yutani's 'solution' to the Xenomorph outbreak was the only way that the people of Earth could ever be safe again. On the twelfth of November, twenty-three twenty-three, a contingency plan was finalised, with the intention of enacting the plan over the course of the next year. By this point, however, many people had already realised that the Earth was no longer fit for habitation. As the death count reached _five-hundred_ million, and estimated populations grew to over thirty-five million, people from around the world began to flee. On the first of January, twenty-three twenty-four, the official evacuation order was given. _Everybody_ had to leave the planet. World governments requested that every available ship within a thousand astronomical units of the Earth, regardless of their current cargo and mission, were immediately rerouted to the planet, to assist in the evacuation. More than nine-hundred million ships responded, from the hugest luxury liners to the smallest space tugs.

As time began to run out for the Earth, evacuation figures soared. In the summer of that year alone, around twenty billion people fled the planet. Another twenty billion were evacuated that autumn, and what was left then was largely escorted from the planet that winter. Once the very last ships had left in late December, it was believed that there could have been more than a billion people still alive on Earth, not taking into account the rising death count of the now billion-strong Xenomorph population. Furthermore, no estimate was given for the number of people who escaped aboard personal transportation vessels, although it was estimated that this figure was exceedingly low. Now that the entire planet had been evacuated, world governments gave the go-ahead for the second stage of their contingency plan. Many leaders still disagreed with the plan, but all of them knew that it was the only way the Xenomorphs could be completely eradicated from existence. And so, on the first of January, twenty-three twenty-five, the order was given. Remotely operated from military installations on both Luna and Mars, over three-hundred thousand nuclear warheads were deployed across the globe. A further seventy-six million intercontinental ballistic missiles, two-hundred million anti-aircraft missiles, six billion smaller explosive devices, and five top-secret 'Z' bombs, belonging to China, India, Russia, Sealand, and the USA, respectively, were detonated and launched. The Xenomorphs, along with those unfortunate people who were unable to flee, as well as the planet itself, were completely obliterated."

"Are you alright, Matthew?" Katie asked quietly, seeing that my face had now become as pale as a ghost. I was slumped on the floor of the wide corridor, my back against the cold, metal wall, my eyes staring off into space. This couldn't be real. It just couldn't be…

"Listen…" Katie continued, crouching down beside me. "I know that you're in shock, Matthew. I mean, it's a difficult thing to hear, and-"

"Difficult thing to hear?" I muttered, shaking my head slowly from side to side. "DIFFICULT THING TO HEAR?!" I got to my feet quickly, my entire body trembling with fear. With anger. With guilt. My face quickly turned from white to red, as red as a tomato, as I lost my temper with Katie.

"I've lost everything, Katie!" I bellowed. "That was my home world! I was born and raised in the north of England, I-I spent the first twenty years of my life there. And now it's gone. Everything's gone. And it's… it's my fault…" Tears began to stream down my face as I collapsed to my knees in agony. A billion people, a _billion_ innocent lives, had been lost because of me. An entire planet had been destroyed, because of me. Because I trusted one of them. Because I devoted everything I had, everything I was, to one of _them_. What had I done? What the fuck had I done?

"Matthew, you can't blame yourself for this." Katie said gently, stepping closer in an attempt to calm me down. "It wasn't your fault…"

"Oh, but it was." I said, breathing heavily as I continued to weep. "It _was_ my fault." By this point in time, Xena had stepped out into the corridor as well. She looked at me in confusion, and stepped closer, just as Katie had done, to try and calm me. I looked at her, tears in my eyes, and gave a warm smile. I had made a monumental mistake when I'd chosen Xena. Perhaps the biggest mistake in the history of the world. If I hadn't gone and done what I did, the Earth would still be here today. But I did it, didn't I? I fell in love with her. I left Nathan and Alan behind, left them to _die_ … because I loved her.

"Katie…" I finally said, my voice barely more than a whisper. "The ship that landed in Dock 17 of the Queen Elizabeth Ship Port in London. The ship which first brought the Xenomorphs to Earth… was the Deep Space Planetary Seeding and Colonisation Vessel Archimedes."

"And?" Katie replied, a confused expression on her face. "Wait. Andi didn't tell us the name of the ship just then. How do you know it?"

"Because it was _my_ ship." I mumbled, choking up the second the words left my mouth. "The Archimedes… was _my_ ship."


	4. Chapter 4

**FOUR of THIRTY-TWO**

*NOTE – Hello everybody, it's me, TheManFromMudos, and I'm here today with another chapter of 'Xavier'. I'd like to apologise for the fact that it's been a whole week since the last chapter was added, but I've been very busy with other matters. Those matters, though, are now resolved, and from now until late August, I should be able to keep up a pretty consistent upload schedule. I'd also like to apologise for how dialogue-heavy these first few chapters have been, although, in fairness, I have had twenty-three years of history to catch you up on. That being said, let's get down to business. This should be the last of the 'introductory' chapters anyway, so after this, things will become much more plot-driven, and much less… dialogue-y. So, without further ado, read on, and as always, please enjoy. It's 'Xavier'. THANK YOU!*

"It all started back in the spring of twenty-three nineteen." I explained. "We were on our way back to Earth after successful seeding operations in the Outer Veil Systems. It wasn't our first mission together as a crew. We'd been on two others before, also seeding operations. But this would be our last." I breathed in deeply as I continued to gaze out through the huge window onto the planet below. I didn't want to relive this, to go through the whole sabysmal sequence of events again. But I had to. Katie had the right to know.

"We, uh… we were woken from stasis by the ship's computer sixteen months ahead of schedule." I continued. "He'd received a distress call from a nearby shuttlecraft, belonging to a Jupiter Mining Corporation ship, the XH-12. As we were a sovereign ship, flying under the banner of Great Britain and her Majesty's Astronomical Maritime Corps, we were duty-bound to respond. And so, the next day, three of us went aboard the craft."

"What happened?" Katie asked quietly. She sat beside me with one hand over my own, comforting me as I recounted my tale.

"We searched the shuttle." I explained. "There were no life signs aboard, but we couldn't be certain that there weren't survivors. We… we found bodies. They'd been mutilated, quite brutally. I suppose we should have taken that as a warning, really. Anyway, we carried on our search, and found a hatch that led to a small generator bay above the main deck. We climbed up, had a look around. There… There were…"

"Are you alright?" Katie asked. She smiled reassuringly as she gently squeezed my hand.

"Yeah." I replied, nodding my head solemnly, before continuing with a deep breath. "There were eggs. In the generator bay. Three or four of them, big enough to fit a person inside. At first, we were intrigued. Then our First Technician Ryan – he was ex-Weyland-Yutani – told us not to approach them. Nathan and I stepped away immediately, but Cara… Cara stepped closer to one of them. I tried to get her to come away from it, but she wouldn't listen. It was like she was in a trance. Then the egg started to… ripple, I suppose. Something was moving inside it. Then the top of the egg opened, and…" I sighed deeply, shaking my head from side to side as I remembered the excruciating moment. I couldn't bear to even say it. But as I looked at Katie glumly, she simply nodded her head, and I knew that she had understood.

"We rushed Cara to the medbay as quickly as we could." I continued, my eyes beginning to well up once again. This time, though, I fought back the tears. "She had this… thing, on her face. It was… keeping her alive. She wasn't dead, I mean. Eventually, it fell off of its own accord. We all thought Cara was going to be fine. Then it got to dinnertime. Our Second Technician Brad had made pasta Bolognese. We were all sat around the table, chatting to each other, having a laugh. Then Cara started to look pale. Then her face turned red, and she collapsed onto the floor." I leaned my head back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling with tears in my eyes. Katie continued to comfort me, understanding that this was a difficult conversation.

"Something ripped its way out of Cara's stomach." I said bluntly. "Two things, in fact. They looked like big worms. Anyway, they quickly ran off into the corridor. There was blood everywhere, Katie. Cara was dead."

"Did you…" Katie began, trying to phrase her question carefully. "Did you love her?"

"We were close." I replied. "I don't know, I suppose… I suppose I did love her, yes. But that's not the point."

"What is the point, then?" She insisted. I closed my eyes and sighed heavily. I knew that Katie meant no harm with her questions, but it was… difficult, for me to deal with them right now.

"The point is that those two things that came out of Cara's stomach were Xenomorphs." I told her, getting to my feet. "We lost Bradley to one of them later that same day. We eventually killed it, but… obviously it had already made its own nest in the engine bay, and… well, you know the rest."

"So those things that killed Cara," Katie remarked hesitantly, "They killed the rest of your crew after you'd left? They got back to Earth?"

"Yes." I nodded, slowly walking over to Xena's side. "Well, one of them did anyway. The other… is right here."

"She's… she's one of them?" Katie asked, slightly taken aback. Xena frowned in annoyance, not appreciative of being classed as 'one of them'.

"Now listen here." I responded in an agitated tone. "Xena might be a Xenomorph, but she's _nothing_ like them. She's… I can't explain."

"She's belongs to a species that led to an entire planet being blown up." Katie replied bluntly. "Not to mention that she killed the woman you loved."

"Not by choice!" I said, astonished by Katie's sudden change of tone. "And _she_ wasn't the one that built the nest in the engine bay, either."

"So let me get this straight." Katie said, getting to her feet with almost visible disgust on her face. "You came across a ship that had been attacked by a killer alien, and then when said killer alien came on board your own ship, instead of trying to kill it, you 'fell in love' with it? And then, and here's the icing on the cake, one of them laid eggs on your ship and it's descendants went on to kill millions of people, and you're _still_ in love with it?"

"Yes!" I shouted angrily, glaring coldly at Katie as I spoke. "She's not a murderer, Katie! I know, as a species, the Xenomorphs are killers. And I know that they caused one of the greatest disasters in human history. But Xena wouldn't hurt a fly. She's… kind, she's caring, and… Yes, I love her." I turned to Xena and smiled up at her with elation, which she returned twofold. After everything that had happened, that was the one thing I was still certain of. I looked at Katie again, who now stared down at her feet awkwardly. I could tell that she already regretted her outburst.

"I'm… sorry." She mumbled, looking me in the eyes apologetically. "I know how you feel about her. I just… I'm shocked, that's all."

"You're shocked?" I scoffed, chuckling slightly. "Imagine finding out that an entire planet's been destroyed because of you."

"Don't talk like that." She replied sympathetically. "There was nothing you could have done and you know it."

"But I _could_ have done something." I muttered. "You just said so yourself. If I hadn't let myself get so involved with Xena, I could have stopped this."

"No, Matthew." Katie insisted, shaking her head with regret. "You know I didn't mean that. I was just in shock."

"It's true though, isn't it?" I remarked glumly. "A billion people, maybe more, have died. If I'd stayed behind, I could have done something about it."

"No, you couldn't!" She exclaimed, insistent on the matter. "And you can't go on thinking like that. Andi told us that the crew of the Archimedes were found dead in their hypersleep booths. If you'd stayed behind, you'd have ended up the same. Surely you realise that?"

"I suppose you're right." I said truthfully. "I just… can't shake this feeling of guilt. So no, maybe I'm not responsible. But I _feel_ it, Katie."

"Then look at it like this." She began with a reassuring smile. "Perhaps if you'd stayed behind on the Archimedes, there was a chance, a tiny, insignificant possibility that you could have saved the world. But if you had done that, nobody on this ship would be here right now." Admittedly, I did feel better about the situation when she put it like that. Then again, if I'd stayed on the Archimedes, the Constantinople disaster would never have happened anyway, and Katie and the children would have survived regardless. Technically speaking, all I'd done was resolve a situation that _I_ created.

"Me and my daughter owe our lives to you, Matthew." Katie continued. "You saved our lives, as well as a little baby boy whose parents most likely abandoned him in their panic. And most importantly, you saved your girlfriend. Twice. So before you beat yourself up over what happened back on Earth, just think: we are all alive because of _you_. We're all relatively happy and healthy, and we're all safe, thanks to you."

"Safe?" I chuckled sarcastically as I slowly shook my head. "We might all be alive and well, but I don't think we're particularly safe."

"What do you mean by that?" She replied. Of course, Katie hadn't quite realised yet just how much danger we were all in.

"There are nearly ten million people on the planet below." I explained. "Most of them are refugees, who fled from Earth after a Xenomorph outbreak." I looked up at Xena with a sad smile, which she returned whilst slowly putting her arm across my back. She knew, as I did, what was going to happen.

"The second we touch down on that planet," I continued, gesturing out of the window as I spoke. "They'll kill Xena. They'll lock us up as sympathisers, unless they kill us, too. The kids'll be taken away, most likely into care, or put up for adoption. Now tell me, Katie: do you still think that we're 'safe'?"

"Then we'll go back into hypersleep." She tried. "We'll find somewhere else to live, somewhere more remote."

"Don't you see, Katie?" I asked, shaking my head. "There is no 'remote' anymore. Everywhere we go from now on will be exactly like this." I peered through the window once again, looking down at the blinding lights of what was once a humble village. There was nowhere left for us to go now.

"If I may be permitted to interrupt, sir?" Andi announced suddenly. "I believe there is another option."

"What's that, Andi?" I asked, becoming intrigued by her remark.

"Allow me to explain." She replied courteously. "After the Earth was destroyed in twenty-three twenty-five, populations swelled on every planet and moon in the Solar System, and indeed beyond. Sedna, however, was one of the most badly affected planets, certainly of the dwarves. Evacuees wanted to distance themselves from the Earth, to get as far away from the Xenomorph threat as possible. So they came here."

"Why are you telling us this, Andi?" Katie interrupted impatiently. She seemed less than impressed with Andi's focus on the history of the planet.

"To deal with the overwhelming population issue, the Sednan government sought help from the Off-World Association." She explained. "A proposal was made whereby a series of immense ships, capable of carrying populations well in excess of a million people, would be constructed, in order to alleviate the population. The ships have no destination, serving quite literally as mobile colonies rather than transportation vessels. As a result, and in credence to their appeal as 'flying countries' rather than super-sized vehicles, the interior of the ships are designed using a 'world in a bottle' approach, as opposed to the conventional solid-stacked floor design, with the inner landmass encompassing both rural and urban communities."

"Hold on a minute." I said hastily as I processed Andi's words in my mind. "Are you saying that these ships literally have countries inside them?"

"That is correct, sir." She replied. "Complete with modern towns and cities, as well as rolling countryside and villages." It seemed almost too good to be true. An actual country _inside_ a spaceship. I'd never heard of such a thing. But if it _was_ true, then… maybe we could seek refuge there.

"Where are these ships, Andi?" I asked, eager to learn more.

"So far, only one such ship has been constructed, with plans to build three more underway." Andi explained. "It is called the Roaming Colony Ship Angelica, built by Omicron Alpha at Titan Shipyards in the latter half of the twenty-three thirties. Late last year, it made it's maiden voyage from Titan to Sedna, and since February of this year, it has remained docked in the Greater Manchester Ship Port, collecting passengers."

"So it's still there now?" Katie interjected, looking out through the window in an attempt to spot the gargantuan ship on the planet below.

"Yes." Andi replied in her usual, slightly-sarcastic tone. "The port is on the far side of the planet. By lucky chance, the departure date just so happens to be… one week from today's date, on the seventh of August, twenty-three forty-two. Passenger boarding closes in three days."

"Three days?" I repeated, now very much invested in this idea. I looked up at Xena, who simply nodded her head with a smile, seemingly quite excited about the premise of living aboard this… Roaming Colony Ship. Then I turned to Katie, who still gazed out of the window onto the bustling city below, and saw that her attitude towards this idea was very different. There was sorrow in her eyes, misery, even. This was her home, after all.

"What's up, Katie?" I asked stupidly, as I already knew perfectly well what was troubling her.

"Nothing." She replied with a weak smile. "It's just… I was so eager to come home, to see the village again at last. But now it's gone. Forever."

"I know it's difficult for you to give up on this place." I assured her warmly. "But we have to do this, Katie. This opportunity is one we can't afford to miss. I mean, everything's practically fallen into our lap. And it leaves in a week? What are the odds?"

"You're right." She said hesitantly, beginning to look slightly less distraught. "This could be our one chance at starting over." I nodded my head in agreement, and saw that Xena did the same. She knew as well as I did that that ship was our only shot at safety. We had to get on board.

"So…" I began, stepping closer to Katie slowly as I spoke. "Are we going to do it?"

"We're going to do it." She replied with a grin. "Andi, take us down to the Greater Manchester Ship Port."

"Now hang on," I interrupted hastily. "Perhaps we should land somewhere where we _won't_ be tackled to the ground by port security as soon as we leave the ship."

"Good idea." She agreed with a curt nod. "Andi, takes us down in the least populated part of the city."

"I'm sorry," Andi replied bluntly. "But I cannot accept orders from passengers. Only a registered crew member may issue such a command." Katie looked at me with a smile, knowing that I was the only such crew member aboard. I turned to Xena for conformation on her part. She nodded eagerly, only too happy to get down to the planet below and get on board that colony ship. Then it was decided. We were going for it.

"Do it, Andi." I announced, a beaming smile across my face. "Take us down to the city."

"Roger that, sir." Andi replied chirpily. "Beginning our descent now."


	5. Chapter 5

**FIVE of THIRTY-TWO**

"Right. Can we recap this one more time?" Katie asked, leaning against a thick pillar of metal which protruded from the wall behind. By this point, we were nearing the end of our descent, and the five of us were now gathered in a nearby external airlock, awaiting the go ahead from Andi to step outside.

"If you insist." I said impatiently, with a subtle roll of the eyes. I had already explained this to Katie twice, but for some reason, she wasn't as… optimistic about our chances as I was. Having said that, though, I must admit that even I wasn't totally convinced this plan would actually _work_.

"Andi's going to take us down in the quietest part of the city." I explained. "Hopefully, it'll be some low-security port with minimal dock staff. Once we're down there, we need to make our way to the Greater Manchester Ship Port in the city centre. That's where we'll find the Angelica."

"And how do you propose we get to the city centre?" She asked, immediately turning her attention to this gaping hole in an otherwise reasonable plan.

"Well…" I said slowly, still not quite sure of the solution to this issue myself. "We'll take a car or something. Shouldn't be too hard to find a-"

"Hang on a minute." She interrupted, taken aback by the proposal. "You mean to say we're going to _steal_ a car?"

"No, Katie," I replied sarcastically, "I thought I'd just pull twenty grand out of my wallet and _buy_ a car!"

"No need to get cocky." She remarked. "Just making sure we're on the same page. And in any case, I don't wish to be an accessory to grand theft auto."

"Don't wish to…" I repeated with a sigh. "You may not have notice Katie, but we are essentially harboring a fugitive as it is. I don't see what difference stealing a car's going to make if we get caught, do you?" I looked at her condescendingly, but she offered no witty response on this occasion.

"And anyway, we can't take public transport, can we?" I continued. "The only way we can get there without Xena being noticed is by car."

"Fine." Katie finally relented. "If it's our only option, we'll take a car. But I'd still like to make it perfectly clear that I wholeheartedly object to this sort of thing."

"Understood." I replied with a sigh. "If we get caught, I'll make it known to the authorities that you had moral objection to stealing the car that you stole."

A short while later, Andi announced that we were now less than five minutes away from our landing site. Whilst I continued to worry that Andi had made completely the wrong decision, and we were inevitably going to step out onto a military airfield or public runway, Xena and Katie gently cradled the children in their arms. I chuckled slightly as Xavier started to cry, and Katie demonstrated to Xena the correct procedure for calming him. I was confident she'd be a brilliant mother, once this was all over. Once we'd made it onto the Angelica, and we could settle down in peace. For now though, we had to concentrate on successfully navigating our way through the bustling city. The key was stealth. To fly under the radar, as it were. Use inconspicuous transportation, stick to the side roads rather than the enormous quadruple-carriageways. But this… 'brilliant' plan could not unfold until we had made a safe and unremarkable landing in the suburbs. And as the entire ship suddenly trembled with a loud thud, and the whir of landing gear resounded from the floor beneath us, I could only hope that we had made that landing. The airlock began to hiss loudly, before the first door slid slowly open. We all stepped through into the tiny chamber as the door closed silently behind us, and the second, external door then began to open.

"So where are we, Andi?" I asked, trying to catch a glimpse of the outside world as the enormous slab of metal slowly drifted aside.

"We are currently outside Hangar 12 of the West Manchester Shuttleport." She replied chirpily. "It is an uncontrolled open airfield which sees regular operation from less than twenty visiting ships a day." A sigh of relief washed over me when I heard this. Despite my concerns, Andi had done it. She'd managed to find somewhere quiet and unguarded. With a little bit of luck, we wouldn't have much trouble from anyone. And so, as the airlock door finally came to rest, I carefully crossed the threshold, and stepped out into the open. The steps down from the airlock to the ground were quite steep, but with some caution, I successfully made it to the bottom, and, for the first time in nearly thirty years, I finally set foot on real, solid ground.

"Well," I called out, turning back to the ship and looking up into the airlock. "Here we are. The beautiful dwarf planet of Sedna."

"What a deplorable shit-hole." Katie remarked, looking out across the airfield from her higher vantage point. At first, I thought she was being a bit rash about the whole thing, but when I looked around at my surroundings in more depth, I realised that she was right. The tarmac beneath us was cracked and torn up in places. The hangar behind was made of rusted, corrugated iron, with large holes in places. And above as, towering floodlights provided a dim light source, flickering constantly, one or two of them not even lit at all. Yes, it truly was an abysmal landing site.

"Well, at least we won't be here for long." I sighed, trying to make the best of a difficult situation. "Now, Xena. You stay here for a minute while me and Katie go and find a car. We'll bring it closer so you can get in without anyone seeing us." Xena nodded, carefully taking Amanda from Katie's arms. As she rocked the two children carefully in her arms, Katie stepped away, and made her own descent down the steps and onto the tarmac of the airfield.

"Let's go." I said enthusiastically, already making my way down the runway towards the hangar behind the Andromeda. "It shouldn't take us too long to find something roadworthy."

"Let's hope not." Katie replied, jogging to catch up. "I want something that looks good, though. Decent speed, too. And no wheels, obviously."

"Hold on." I interrupted, placing a hand out in front of her as I spoke. "We're not car shopping, you know. We'll take what we can get."

"Sorry." She retorted cockily. "I'm just saying, you know, if we're really going to steal a car, we might as well make it a good one."

"And _I'm_ just saying, if you want a good car, you should go out and buy one." I replied bluntly. Katie simply glared at me in response. But it was true, after all. We couldn't really afford to be picky about which car we stole. We just had to find whatever we could, and take it. Plain and simple.

A minute or two later, we had reached the far corner of the hangar behind the ship. I gestured to Katie to wait as I peered around the corner of the rusted metal building. My eyes immediately fell upon two vehicles which were parked against the back wall of the hangar.

"I think we've found what we're looking for." I called over to Katie. She slowly came out from around the corner of the building, and her eyes met the two vehicles. Without hesitation, she ran over to me, her face lit up with elation. I immediately knew which of the two she was more interested in.

"Is that what I think it is?" She gasped, her voice filled with childlike enthusiasm. She pointed to one of the two vehicles. It was a yellow sports car, sleek, stylish and most likely immensely speedy. It had a convertible roof, two brown leather seats, and, as is always the way with sports cars these days, no wheels.

"That's a Cridlington Mach-S!" Katie blurted out joyfully. I simply looked at her in confusion. "Oh, Matthew, don't tell me you've never heard of it?"

"I'm afraid not." I said truthfully. I wasn't really that into cars, truth be told. As long as it could get me from A to B, I'd settle for anything.

"It was the first production car to break the sound barrier!" She explained eagerly. Of course, I was immediately unimpressed by this information.

"Tell me, Katie," I said with a tut. "Where exactly would one go in order to be able to actually travel at supersonic speeds _on a road_?"

"Well… you can't." She replied hesitantly. "But that's not the point, Matthew. The point is, you _could_ travel faster than the speed of sound. Potentially."

"Potentially?" I chuckled, shaking my head. "Who in their right mind would waste their money on a car which could _potentially_ travel at Mach 1?"

"Mach 1.24, actually." Katie replied, correcting me. "And anyway, it's a nineties classic. Collectors would go mad for a car like that."

"Yes, but we're not collectors, are we?" I remarked. "We're criminals, there are five of us, and we need to be inconspicuous. Which is why, Katie, we're taking _that_ one." I pointed to the vehicle parked beside the Cridlington Mach-S. It was a small white van, with four thick black tires wrapped around its dull grey wheel rims, a small, square bonnet poking out from the front, and windowless double doors at the back. In short, it was atrocious. Perfect.

"You must be joking." Katie scoffed, staring at the van in disgust. "You really think that we should take _that_? An Antorani Erinome van?"

"It's perfect, Katie." I replied plainly. "Is it inconspicuous? Yes. Will we all fit in? Yes. Will anyone be able to see Xena hiding in the back? No."

"Will we get to the other side of the planet before the end of the week? No." She retorted sarcastically, clearly unimpressed by the idea.

"Come on now, Katie." I said with a sigh. "You do understand that we can't take the sports car, don't you?"

"But it's a van, Matthew!" She whined, quite adamant on the matter. "It's big, it's slow, it's uncomfortable."

"It's unremarkable." I insisted. "We'll blend in with the crowd. Whereas in… that thing, we'll stick out like a sore thumb."

"But-" Katie tried, however I was quick to interrupt, as I was fast losing my patience with her by this point.

"Katie!" I snapped, becoming agitated. "We are taking the van, and that's that, so will you please shut the hell up about the fucking sports car!" She was rather taken aback by this outburst, her eyes wide in shock, her mouth slightly agape. Then, her expression turned to one of discontent.

"Fine." She muttered in annoyance. "We'll take the stupid van. How exactly are we going to get into it anyway?"

"Leave that to me…" I assured her, reaching into my pocket and producing a small metal paperclip. Katie simply stared at me in confusion.

"A paperclip?" She asked, furrowing her brow. "What use is that going to be exactly?"

"We can pick the lock on the back doors with it." I explained, already bending the paperclip into a long, straight piece of thin metal.  
"Wouldn't you be better off with one of these?" She asked, pulling a handful of hair pins out of her own pocket.

"Probably." I admitted with a quick nod. "Oh, we'll need a screwdriver, too. Might have one in here somewhere." I fiddled around in my pockets frantically, trying to find anything I could that'd do the job. Thankfully, I found a tiny, flat-headed screwdriver tucked into a pocket on my arm. I pulled it out, and led Katie over to the van, hair pins in hand, to attempt to pick the lock.

"Have you ever done this before?" She asked as I shoved the screwdriver as far into the tiny keyhole as it would go.

"What, stolen a car you mean?" I replied, taking one of the bobby pins from her hand and jamming it into the lock beneath the screwdriver.

"No, I mean have you ever picked a lock?" She explained. As she spoke, she quickly glanced over her shoulder to make sure nobody was about.

"No." I told her honestly. "I've seen it done in films and that, though. And let's be fair, how different can a film really be to real life?"

"Fair enough." She replied, shrugging her shoulders. "I suppose sometimes it does feel like we're living in a film, doesn't it?"

"I don't know." I sighed, fiddling desperately with the screwdriver and the bobby pin. "Maybe a sci-fi novel. Or novella, at least." Finally, I heard a loud click from inside the lock. I quickly pulled the screwdriver and the hair pin out from the keyhole and handed them to Katie. Then, I wrapped my hands around the two door handles on the large double doors, and pulled back on them. The doors opened wide, revealing a spacious, empty interior.

"There you go." I announced, turning to Katie with a smile. "Plenty of room for everyone. Now, in you get."

"What, you want me to climb over the seats?" She asked, peering into the dingy inside of the van. "It's a good job I'm wearing trousers then, isn't it?"

"Just get in." I repeated with a chuckle. "I know it doesn't quite suit your tastes as a car fanatic, but it's really not that bad, is it?"

"I suppose not." She agreed, slowly clambering into the back of the van and making her way towards the front seats. "And I'm not a car fanatic!"

"Oh, please." I said bluntly, following her into the van and slamming the doors behind me. " _Oh, that's the Cridlington Mach-S, Matthew. It's a nineties classic, Matthew. Collectors would go mad for a car like that, Matthew._ " I continued to mock her jokingly as I lifted myself over the back of the seats, and soon found myself sat behind the Antorani Erinome's enormous steering wheel. Now all I had to do was start it.

"Now, where's the ignition in this thing?" I asked, looking around the underside of the steering wheel for another keyhole.

"Right there." Katie replied with a sigh, pointing to a small button on my left which was labeled 'ignition'.

"Yeah, that's the one." I said foolishly, pushing the button firmly down. The van's engine turned over a couple of times, and then started with a groan.

"You can actually drive, can't you?" She asked, looking at me with a concerned expression on her face.

"I'll have you know, Katie," I assured her confidently. "That I'm perfectly qualified to drive in all environments between naught point eight and one point two G."

"Sedna's gravity is one point four G." She replied bluntly. "It's the strongest anywhere in the Solar System, in fact."

"One point four G?" I repeated, astonished. "Blimey, it's a wonder you're not all four foot two!"

"The gravitational stabilisers are too strong for the planet." She explained. "Believe me, it's been petitioned. A lot."

"I thought it felt like I was carrying an extra stone or two when we landed." I smirked. "I'm surprised we can even stand up straight."

"In any case, you need a special license to drive here." Katie told me. "An OA Interplanetary Standard license won't cut it."

"Well, we're already criminals." I announced with a grin. "Might as well add 'insufficient driving license' to the list." She nodded in agreement, returning the grin. I carefully took one hand to the steering wheel, and the other to the gear stick. Finally, after positioning my feet above the appropriate pedals, I pulled the stick into the reverse position, and slowly backed the van away from it's parking space. And with that, we were away. All we had to do now was pick up Xena and the kids, then we could finally head to the Greater Manchester Ship Port and board the RCS Angelica.


	6. Chapter 6

**SIX of THIRTY-TWO**

*NOTE – Hello everybody, it's me, TheManFromMudos, and I'm back again today with another chapter of 'Xavier', which, as you may be shocked to find, is actually on schedule this time! That's right, for the first time since beginning this story, I have successfully managed to finish a chapter two days after writing the previous one. Who knows, maybe I'll even get the _next_ one done within two days. Then again, it's becoming harder and harder for me to write these chapters in a single sitting these days, especially since the average length of each one has almost doubled since 'Xena'. Thankfully, I'm still managing to get by at the moment, so here's another one for you! Don't hesitate to let me know what you think of this chapter and the story so far, and I'll be back again for the next one. Until then, sit back, relax, read on and enjoy. It's 'Xavier'. THANK YOU!*

A couple of minutes later, I'd managed to get the hang of driving the van, and we had taken it around to the other side of the hangar. The increased gravity here meant that handling was difficult, with the steering wheel apparently having little jurisdiction over the vehicle itself, but I managed to keep it under control. As we slowly backed up against the airlock steps of the Andromeda, I quickly pulled up the handbrake, and the van came to a stand still.

"I'll get everyone in." I told Katie, pushing open the driver's side door and stepping out once again onto the weathered tarmac. I walked around to the back of the van slowly, and unsuccessfully attempted to pull open the doors. Of course, they had locked themselves again after being shut.

"Katie?" I called, poking my head around the passenger's side of the van. "I need you to open the doors from the inside."

"Are you having a laugh?" She replied, annoyed by the fact that she would have to climb over the seats a second time.

"Fucking van." I heard her chunter as she clambered into the back. "Could've taken a brand-new sports car, but _no_ , it's 'too conspicuous', isn't it?" Finally, the doors flung open, revealing a less than satisfied Katie on her hands and knees inside. She glared at me coldly as I tried to resist the urge to laugh, and climbed out onto the airfield with an irritated look on her face.

"Not one word." She muttered as she swept the dust from her knees. I simply continued to smirk, which frankly did _not_ impress her.

"Anyway," I said, already making my way up the steps to the airlock. "Let's get to it, shall we? You'd better grab the kids and take them into the front."

"Don't you think that's a bit dangerous?" She asked, becoming concerned for the children's safety. She was right, of course. But what choice did we have?

"Oh, you think they'd be safer in the back, do you?" I remarked sarcastically, turning around midway up the steps.

"I suppose not." She muttered with a sigh. Then, she followed me up the steps, looking down at her feet to avoid stumbling.

"Look, I know it's not ideal." I assured her as we continued up towards the airlock. "But we've got to make the best of a difficult situation, haven't we?" She didn't reply to this, but nodded her head with an apologetic smile. I shared her sentiment, really I did. But let's be honest, we couldn't afford to waste any more time looking for a more appropriate vehicle, could we? Otherwise, we'd be in even more danger. We'd be stuck here on Sedna.

"Okay, Xena." I called out as I pulled open the airlock door with a groan. "We've got a car. Sort of. Alright, it's a van, but what can you do, eh?" When I heard no reply of any kind from her, I stepped into the airlock chamber cautiously. I looked around, and found her sat on the floor, both children sound asleep in her arms. Judging by her lack of responsiveness when I spoke, I assumed that she too, had fallen asleep.

"Zee?" I said softly, rocking her shoulder gently. Her head bolted up with a start as she awoke, and she appeared to 'look' around in confusion.

"It's alright, Xena, you've just got hypersleep fatigue." I explained, taking one of the babies, namely Amanda, from her carefully. As I turned around and passed the child to Katie, she got to her feet with a yawn, or at least, a close approximation of one, and handed me Xavier.

"Right." I announced, stepping towards the airlock door once again. "Let's get everyone into the van, and we can be off." Katie nodded, and stepped out before me, making her way down the steps with extra caution this time. I followed, executing the same level of care with Xavier in my arms. When I was halfway down the steps, I looked back, and saw that Xena was still stood in the doorway of the airlock.

"Are you coming, Xena?" I asked, seeing that she was reluctant to leave the airlock. She simply gazed blankly at me with an affrighted expression.

"Katie, can you take Xavier for me?" I asked, hurrying my way down the rest of the steps and thrusting the baby into her arms before she could respond. Then, I turned around, and rushed back up to the top, where Xena still cowered in the airlock.

"What's wrong, Zee?" I asked quietly, although I already had some idea of what was bothering her. I took her hand as she continued to peer through the doorway anxiously, and attempted to lead her out onto the steps, but she quickly took her hand back, shaking her head adamantly.

"Hey, it's alright." I said warmly, placing a hand on her shoulder and stroking her arm gently. "There's nothing to be afraid of." Although clearly reluctant to do so, she finally brought herself to step out into the open. She gazed around in both fear and awe of the world around her.

"There you are, you see? Perfectly safe." I assured her, slowly leading her down the steps towards the van. "You're outdoors, Xena. Daunting, isn't it?" She nodded quickly in agreement, still somewhat apprehensive of this new and mysterious environment. I felt quite proud of her, though. For the first time ever, Xena was outside, and whilst she was still quite afraid, I was confident that she would soon kick her agoraphobia.

"Come on, then." I continued, carrying on down the steps towards the van. Xena followed nervously, stumbling a couple of times on the narrow steps. Once she reached the bottom, I gestured to the open doors on the back of the van. She looked at me blankly with a disapproving expression.

"What?" I said naïvely, shrugging my shoulders. "It's all we could find." She shook her head with a sigh, but climbed in to the vehicle regardless.

"At least nobody'll see you back here, eh?" I told her in an attempt to lighten the mood. She was definitely less than impressed by this remark. Nevertheless, she seemed to accept my logic. As I slammed the doors shut behind her, I heard her growl quietly, as if muttering under her breath. I'd had my fair share of this from Katie already, so I was pretty unphased. As I walked back around to the driver's side door of the van, I heard Katie chattering quietly, and Xena continued to make various growling and hissing noises. I could only conclude that they were having some kind of conversation about me, namely regarding my poor choice of transportation. It was at this point that I realised that I wasn't sure whether I'd be able to cope with having two women in my life from now on. Was this how it was going to be? Them chatting about me behind my back? I dreaded to think.

"Something the matter, ladies?" I asked, glaring at both Katie and Xena sincerely as I got into the van and shut the door behind me.

"Not at all, Matthew." Katie replied. "We're quite alright. Aren't we, Zee?" Xena simply nodded her head in agreement.

"If you say so." I muttered, pulling my seatbelt down over my shoulder. I fumbled around with it for a moment or two, until it finally clicked into place.

"Alright, everybody." I announced, wrapping my hand around the handbrake and releasing it carefully. "Here we go!" The van slowly began to roll forwards as I pressed my foot down onto the accelerator, and we finally pulled away from the Andromeda. Now, we were well and truly on the road. I turned the wheel with great effort, and started my way down towards the bottom of the airfield. The van bumped and jostled around on the rough ground, so much so that I was literally lifted out of my seat a couple of times, but I tried not to notice it. Right now, I was concentrating on the bigger picture. In just a few short days, we could be aboard the Roaming Colony Ship Angelica, ready to start our new lives. And yes, it was a long shot, and overly ambitious, and things probably wouldn't go this idealistic way that I thought they would in my mind, but I didn't care. We had a chance. We had hope.

"What's going to happen to Andi, then?" Katie asked, peering back through the window towards the Andromeda.

"I don't know." I said, shrugging my shoulders. "She'll probably stay here for a few months before anybody realises she's been abandoned. Eventually, the ship'll get taken away by the local authorities. With any luck, it'll get returned to Callisto, to the Indo-Japanese colonies, and then put back into public service."

"She'll be fine, then?" Katie continued, apparently quite concerned for Andi's wellbeing, which I found particularly unusual.

"She's just a computer, you know, Katie." I said bluntly. No sooner than I'd finished my sentence, though, I realised just how closed-minded it made me sound.

"You really believe that, do you?" She remarked, shaking her head in disapproval. "I would've thought that you of all people would understand that anything which is intelligent enough to achieve sentience should be treated as an equal." She gestured over her shoulder to Xena, just to make sure I took her meaning.

"I suppose you're right." I said with a sigh, whilst giving Xena an apologetic glance. "Look, she'll be fine. She's a big girl, she can look after herself."

"I hope you're right." Katie replied, looking back at the Andromeda one last time. "Even though we didn't know her for long… I think I'll miss her."

"Me too." I agreed. "But, bigger things await us now, don't they?" Katie nodded, as did Xena. 'And hopefully', I thought to myself as we pulled out onto a small road at the end of the airfield, 'it won't take us too long to get there'. I'd soon discover, however, just how wrong I was about _that_.

Around two and a half hours or so later, we were deep within the city of Manchester, but by this point, the mood in the van was anything but cheery. From the very moment we'd left the West Manchester Shuttleport, I'd had absolutely no idea where we were going. There were signs everywhere, of course, but the city was a maze of one way streets and roundabouts. All of this was proving very stressful for me, as the last time I'd driven a car in a big city was… Sheffield, England in twenty-three ten. The van, meanwhile, continued to groan and strain, the petrol gauge verging on 'empty'.

"We're lost, aren't we?" Katie asked as I turned down a narrow alleyway. Surprise, surprise, it was another dead end.

"Of course we're not lost." I lied, carefully reversing back out onto the road. "There are signs everywhere; I know exactly where we are."

"So do I." She remarked, rocking the children, who were both crying loudly, as she spoke. "I know we're exactly nowhere near where we should be."

"I don't know why you're getting snappy with me." I told her, trying to keep my cool. "You don't know this city any more than I do."

"Oh, dear…" She mumbled under her breath, looking out of the window to avoid eye contact. We're going to miss our flight…"

"We're not going to miss our flight!" I snapped. "And I keep telling you, it's not a flight. 'Flight' implies that it's traveling somewhere."

"Does it fly? Yes. Is it therefore a flight? Yes!" She said cockily, quickly becoming irritated by the situation.

"Look, stop being pedantic." I said calmly, taking a deep breath as I pulled up at a set of traffic lights. "You're not helping the situation."

"Oh, I'm being pedantic, am I?" She laughed mockingly. "But _'Flight' implies that it's traveling_ _ **somewhere**_ , doesn't it, Matthew?"

"Don't make me turn this van around!" I said, almost shouting. Honestly, this was hands-down one of the most stressful experiences of my entire life.

"Oh my God, Matthew, look." Katie suddenly blurted out, staring off into the distance through the windscreen.

"Don't try to change the subject!" I said angrily. She wasn't going to wriggle out of this argument _that_ easily.

"No seriously, look!" She repeated, nodding her head towards some point off in the distance. I turned to see what it was she had spotted. My mouth immediately fell agape as I saw it. I don't know how I'd even managed to miss it. But sure enough, peaking out from behind a cluster of skyscrapers on our right, was a ship. An enormous ship. It towered literally miles into the air, and was so long that the ends were not visible from our current viewpoint.

"Jesus…" I whispered, completely awestruck by the truly immense vehicle. It was incomprehensibly huge, seventy or eighty miles in length.

"Is that it?" Katie asked, also taken aback by the sight before her. "Is that the Angelica?" I simply nodded my head. It was at this point that I realised I wasn't concentrating at all on the road, so I quickly returned my focus to driving, just in time to swerve around a cyclist directly in front of us.

"So that's where we're going?" Katie asked, still recovering from the initial shock of seeing the gargantuan Angelica.

"It certainly is." I announced, slowly bringing the van to a halt at yet another set of traffic lights. "And look at that." I pointed to the road directly ahead of the lights, which transformed into a large motorway flyover. Over the road hung a large sign, which bore a rightward facing arrow, as well as the words 'Greater Manchester Ship Port – 12'. At last, we were heading in the right direction. And more to the point, we were only twelve miles away from it. It wouldn't take us more than half an hour to get there now. By the end of the day, we could be on that ship. That vast, ominous vessel, the size of a small country inside. As the lights turned green, I pulled away from the junction quickly, driving straight ahead into the rightward lane of the motorway flyover, and we began our final stretch of the journey. The journey to our new home, our new lives. The journey to Angelica.


	7. Chapter 7

**SEVEN of THIRTY-TWO**

*NOTE – Hi everyone, it's TheManFromMudos here. Today, I'm bringing you another chapter of 'Xavier', of course. But before that, I'd like to make something clear to you all. Recently, I've been having trouble writing. It's not that I've been unable to write, I've got stories coming out of my ears! It's more that I just haven't _wanted_ to write. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy writing for FanFiction, and I always have. I suppose I've simply felt at times as though I was doing all this writing for nothing. After two whole weeks, or thereabouts, without a new chapter, I considered postponing the story indefinitely, giving up on the whole thing. Then, I looked back at some reviews for 'Xena' and 'Xanthus', and I thought: 'You know what? All this writing, all this effort, it's not for nothing. It's for _you_ , the reader. I've come much too far to disappoint you all now by cutting this story short.' And that cheered me up a lot. So much so, in fact, that I decided _not_ to give up on the story. I _am_ going to keep writing, as long as you're going to keep reading. In other words, TheManFromMudos is here to stay! So, it's with great pleasure, although it's been a while, that I bring you the next chapter of the story. I don't know when the _next_ one will be, but I promise you that it _will_ be here eventually. So, read on and enjoy. It's 'Xavier'. THANK YOU!*

The final stretch of our drive through the city of Manchester was much less stressful than what had come before it. The motorway was busy, but not so much as the tightly packed city streets within the labyrinth of skyscrapers behind us. The scenery around has had also changed by this point. Of course, the immense concrete jungle still loomed over us on both sides of the road, but whilst the right hand side remained choc-a-bloc with building after building after building, those on the left hand side had slowly dispersed, until the landscape had been largely taken up by landing docks and ship ports. We passed numerous large ships as we drove along, luxurious passenger liners several times the size of the Andromeda, and even more eponymous freighters, but none came close to the sheer might of the Angelica in the distance. As we continued to approach the impossibly large vessel ahead of us, it quickly began to dominate the view through the front windscreen. Eventually, apart from the odd tower block here and there on the right hand side of the road, and a couple of large cargo ships on the left, nothing else could be seen other than the towering ship. Even as I craned my neck upwards, trying to catch a glimpse of the night sky above, I found that it simply could not be seen. Everything around us was utterly dwarfed by the colossal spacecraft.

Finally, another ten minutes or so later, we reached the exit for the Greater Manchester Ship Port. Traffic had built up tremendously by this point, with a substantial queue forming at the exit ramp. Presumably, they were all going to the same place as we were. I had no doubt that a ship the size of the Angelica had probably opened boarding months ago, but it was in these final days before it's departure that the real rush would take place. This was actually quite helpful for us, as we could blend in with the crowd, so to speak.

"Busy, isn't it?" Katie retorted, craning her neck in an attempt to find the front of the queue. I continued to budge forwards until we finally reached the turn off at the top of the ramp.

"Well, it's always the way." I sighed, slowly turning onto a long road which ran parallel to the side of the Angelica. "I reckon boarding will be open right up to the last minute."

"As long as we're not waiting up to the last minute." She remarked. "I _was_ hoping we could board by the end of the day."

"Don't panic…" I replied patronisingly, pulling forwards again. "They won't all be boarding in the same place, anyway."

"Won't they?" Katie asked foolishly. For a moment, I thought she was being sarcastic, but then I saw genuine confusion on her face, and so decided to offer some explanation.

"A ship this big will have more than one boarding area." I told her. "It could have dozens of them, in fact, on both sides."

"So we can just go to the nearest one, then?" She asked, already looking around for some kind of signage. I simply shook my head in response.

"Do you not think everyone else is going to have that same idea?" I asked, gesturing to the lengthy queue of cars in front of us. "We'll go to the next one along." We couldn't go to the nearest boarding area, that was for sure. Otherwise, we really would be waiting around all day.

"Are you sure about that, Matthew?" Katie announced, gesturing to a large sign over the road ahead. It read, in huge white letters: 'Gate Tau', with an arrow pointing to the right, and beneath that were pretty much the last words that I wanted to see right now: 'NEXT GATE TWELVE MILES'.

"Fuck that." I remarked, quickly changing lanes to turn off for Gate Tau. "I'd rather wait in line."

A few minutes or so later, we had made our way down the access road towards Gate Tau. The traffic was still heavy, but noticeably less so than before. It seemed a few people had been bold, or indeed stupid, enough to drive ahead to the next gate. Those that had chosen to turn off here, though, were quickly becoming impatient. I lost track of the number of times that someone behind us honked their horn with irritation. Little by little, we edged down the access road, closer and closer to the gate, until the end was finally in sight. Hanging over the road ahead was a toll booth, the apparent cause of the queue. Beyond that, a large parking area slowly began to fill with vehicles. The car park appeared to be an enormous carousel system, with drivers leaving their vehicles to board the ship on foot, and the entire platform being lifted into the air when full, revealing a fresh set of parking spaces beneath. Presumably, the vehicles would be loaded onto the ship _en masse_ once the carousel was full. I was concerned for a moment about whether or not the cars would be checked before being loaded. If we were going to leave Xena in the van whilst Katie and I boarded with the children, would dock staff eventually find her? Then again, surely they didn't have enough manpower or time to check every single vehicle. There had to be more than a hundred cars on each platform, of which there were eight or nine on the carousel. And I had no doubt that the same system was in place at every other gate. There were potentially tens of thousands of cars waiting to be loaded. Yes, Xena would be fine. Wouldn't she?

"Matthew?" Katie whispered, elbowing me sharply. Suddenly, I snapped out of my daze. For a moment there, I'd completely lost myself in my thoughts.

I looked around, and realised that we were now right beside the toll booth. Inside, a stout gentleman with greying hair glared at me impatiently.

"Uh-four, please." I stammered, my brain quickly catching up to the moment we were now in. "Two adults, two children."

"Certainly, sir." The man in the toll booth said, punching the order into a small keyboard behind the desk. "That'll be… one-two-eighty, please."

"One thousand two hundred and eighty pounds?!" I exclaimed. I couldn't believe it! As if I had that kind of money on me.  
"No, sir, that's one thousand two hundred and eighty Sednan dollars." The man replied, correcting me with a smug grin.

"And what's the exchange rate?" I sighed, although in truth, I didn't even want to know, lest it give me a sudden and unexpected heart attack.  
"It's twenty-five pounds to the dollar, sir." He explained, pointing to a currency list printed onto the front booth.

"What?!" I bellowed, now even more astonished. One thousand two hundred and eighty times twenty-five? I could _buy_ a ship for that kind of money!

"That's over twenty-five grand!" I snapped, blatantly refusing to accept that four tickets would cost _that_ much money. "You must be mad if you think I'm going to shell out that kind of money for four measly tickets aboard that… that…. oversized tin can!"  
"It's alright, Matthew." Katie announced calmly, steadying Amanda on her lap as she reached into her left pocket. "I'll pay."

"There you go, she'll pa- What do you mean you'll pay?" I gasped, suddenly realising the implications of what she'd just said.

"I'll pay for the tickets." She repeated, producing a burgundy-coloured credit card from her pocket. "Do you accept TFU cards?"

"Of course, ma'am." The man in the ticket booth said with a smile. "We accept cards from all major banks and building societies."

"Well, here you go, then." She replied, reaching over me to pass him the card. All the while, I simply sat silently, completely taken aback by this new revelation. A Triton Financial Union card? That caliber of financial recognition could only mean one thing… that Katie was rich.

"Thank you, miss." The man nodded, touching the card against a small scanner beside him. "Here are your tickets. And… here is your card."

"Thank you very much." Katie smiled, taking both the tickets and card and stuffing them into her pocket. "Come on then, Matthew, we're holding people up."

"Hmm?" I said distantly, my mind still focused on the illustrious TFU card that Katie had been hiding all this time.

"Drive over to the car park, Matthew." She mumbled, gesturing towards the parking carousel.

"Oh, yes. Of course." I replied, still distant, as I pulled away from the toll booth with a perplexed expression across my face. I continued to dwell on this… unexpected revelation as I slowly drove the van up onto the platform, and pulled back into the nearest empty space. And then, when I was finally in the perfect position within the space, I turned the key in the ignition, the engine slowly ground to a halt, and I immediately let it all out.

"And just when were you planning to tell me that you're absolutely loaded?" I snapped, glaring at Katie with great disapproval.

"I'm not 'loaded'!" She replied, astonished by my outlandish assertion. "I admit, I may be… financially well-off, but I'm not loaded."

"Oh, please." I scoffed, shaking my head in disbelief. "You're raking it in! Triton Financial Union? That's literally the most high-class bank there is!"

"It's not that high-class." She mumbled, avoiding eye contact as she spoke. She knew as well as I did that that was a blatant lie.

"For God's sake, Katie, there's a Latin inscription on the card!" I exclaimed, trying my best to remain calm and rational about the situation.

"I don't see why it's such a big deal." She insisted, shrugging her shoulders. "Okay, maybe I am… 'loaded', but we're all in the same boat, aren't we?"

"I suppose so." I muttered, sighing deeply as I turned into the parking area. "I just don't understand why you didn't think to mention this before."  
"It never seemed relevant." She told me truthfully. I saw her point, of course. It wasn't the sort of thing you just mentioned casually in conversation. But seriously? All this time, she'd been holding potential millions in her pocket? No wonder she was so keen to take the Cridlington Mach S back at the West Manchester Shuttleport, she probably owned three of them already and wanted it for her collection. Nevertheless, I tried my best to remain calm. So what if Katie had been holding onto an immense fortune all this time? So what if she never thought the moment was 'relevant' enough for her to mention it to me. I wasn't mad at her. No… I was _absolutely_ fine. Yes, everything was just fine and dandy. Sunshine and rainbows. Unicorns and-

"Are you alright, Matthew?" Katie asked, interrupting my train of thought.

"No I'm not fucking alright!" I shouted angrily. "Look, I just… I don't know if I can trust you."

"What?" She replied, bewildered, frowning at me as the babies started to cry in response to my outburst. "What do you mean you can't trust me?"

"Well how do I know that you aren't keeping other things quiet, eh?" I told her sincerely.

"I promise you, Matthew, I'm not." She insisted. I could tell by the look in her eye that she was telling the truth this time. But I still felt somewhat betrayed. This wasn't the sort of thing I'd expect someone to keep quiet about. If I was rich, let me tell you, people would _know_.

"So how did you end up with so much money, then?" I said calmly, trying to rationalise the situation as well as I could.

"It's a long story." She replied. "But now's not the time to tell it." Of course. She wouldn't tell me. Not that I had a problem with that, of course.

"Fine." I assured her, shrugging my shoulders as I pushed open the driver's side door and stepped out of the van. "I'll find out one day, you know."

"And until that day, you can forever dwell on all those countless explanations." Katie remarked, pushing open her own door and climbing out.

As I slammed the driver's door shut, I took in a deep breath of fresh air ('fresh' being a relative term, in this instance.) Then, I gazed up at the goliath of a spaceship behind me. Seeing the Angelica this close up was a truly grounding experience. It towered over everything that surrounded it. I could only imagine at this point how it would feel to stand _inside_ the ship, gazing up at the impossibly high ceiling, staring off into the distance at the four walls that contained us, and everything else, aboard. Soon enough, though, I'd know. Soon enough, I'd experience it for the first time.

"Got everything?" I asked Katie, turning to see the woman laden with a various selection of items, and of course, two babies.

"I think so." She replied with a quick nod. "Besides, if anything's still in the van, Xena'll look after it 'till we come for her."

"Fair enough." I remarked, shrugging my shoulders. At this point, I wandered back over to the van, and peered in through the dusty window to see Xena leaning over the seats with a sorrowful expression on her face. I should have known that she wouldn't take lightly to being left like this.

"Don't worry, Zee." I whispered, sticking my head through the window with a smile. "We'll be back for you as soon as we're on board, alright?" She seemed reluctant at first, but eventually nodded, albeit with a solemn expression. I know the situation wasn't exactly ideal, was it? But it was the only thing we could do right now. Once we were on the ship, we could head to the countryside, and nobody would ever know that she was even aboard.

"Just remember, Zee." I continued, stroking the top of her head gently to comfort her as I spoke. "Keep your head down. Alright?" The forlorn Xenomorph simply nodded in response, and shot me a quick smile, laced with despair. I returned the gesture by leaning in closer, quickly kissing her before we parted ways. Then, I heard Katie coughing behind me to get my attention, which ended the moment rather abruptly.

"We've got to go now, Xena." I told her, breaking away from her abruptly. "We'll be back soon, I promise. I love you." Xena beamed happily at this. It always seemed to cheer her up a little when I said that. As if she… wasn't really sure about it unless I provided occasional conformation.

"Ready to go now?" Katie asked, thrusting Xavier into my arms as I walked over to her. Before I could even answer, she'd begun to walk towards the exit to the car park. I rushed to catch up, slightly taken aback by the sudden change in her demeanor. It was only then that it really clicked for me, you know. I detected something in Katie then. Something which I hadn't really considered before. But it was there. And I knew in that moment that it could perhaps be the biggest challenge Xena and I would ever face as a couple. It was the slightest spark, but Katie had it in her. The spark of jealousy.


	8. Chapter 8

**EIGHT of THIRTY-TWO**

*NOTE – Hello everybody, it's me, TheManFromMudos, and I'm back again today with another chapter of 'Xavier'. Again, I apologise for the fact that it's been a while since the last chapter was uploaded, but now that we're approaching almost three thousand words a chapter, these things take time. The good news it that I've just finished finalising all of the major and minor plot points for the story, and successfully woven a finely-tuned backstory into the whole thing. So please, trust me when I say that this story is going to blow your mind. For a while, nothing will make sense, and then, suddenly, everything will. I'm really looking forward to writing it, and I hope you are to reading it. But for now, we've got catching up to do. So, here it is, fresh off the press, Chapter Eight of Thirty-Two. It's 'Xavier'. THANK YOU!*

The next few moments passed in complete silence. As we made our way through the car park towards the entrance gate, I debated with myself over whether or not I should question Katie on her behaviour. I eventually decided that it was only right that I said _something_ , albeit implicitly.  
"Are you alright, Katie?" I asked in a concerned but supportive tone. I glanced at her inquisitively as I spoke, my brow furrowed with intrigue.  
"I'm fine." She replied hesitantly, refusing to make eye contact with me as she spoke. Instead, she continued to gaze down at the baby in her arms.  
"Are you sure?" I continued, wanting desperately to hear some sort of… confession from her. Just so that I knew where we stood.  
"Honestly, Matthew," Katie insisted with a sigh. "I'm fine." She smiled at me weakly as she said this, which instantly gave the lie away.  
"Alright, then." I remarked, deciding not to push the conversation any further. "If you say so." Of course, I knew in truth that we would have to discuss this in more detail at some point. If there was any risk of Katie coming between me and Xena, I had to know about it.  
"Anyway…" I sighed, trying to break the awkward silence which had once again emerged between us. "Can I have a closer look at those tickets?"  
"I suppose so." Katie replied, reaching into her pocket and producing the four tickets which we (well, _she_ ) had just purchased.

"Here you go." She mumbled, quickly handing the thin slips of card to me. I took them from her carefully, as they were already crumpled somewhat from being in her pocket, and I didn't want to rip them. Whatever would we do then? Then again, Katie could probably afford dozens more.  
"'RCS Angelica Nine-Nine-Eight-Six-Two-Eight-Zero-Three-Four'." I said aloud, reading the bold, brown letters from the front of the mint green card. "'Boarding Pass: For Arrival at Gate Tau'. 'Please keep this card with you at all times… Do not use another person's card… Retain for future reference'."  
"Seems simple enough." Katie said, shrugging her shoulders. "But where do we go once we've boarded?"  
"Let's see..." I replied distantly as I scanned over the small print at the bottom of the card. "Ah, here we are. 'Upon boarding, please proceed to your nearest Registry Office to apply for citizenship and discuss housing options'."  
"Housing options?" Katie repeated. "You mean we'll have to pay for a house as well as the tickets?"  
"Well, _you_ will." I said bluntly, grinning smugly as I spoke. "But surely someone of your financial stature wouldn't mind that. Would you?"  
"You're a complete knob head, Matthew, you know that?" She replied jokingly. "Yes, I suppose _I_ will have to pay for all of this. But as soon as we're settled down on this ship, _you_ are getting a job. Understand?"

"I already have one, remember?" I assured her, pointing to the rank slide on my shoulder. "Senior Navigational Officer of the DSPSCV Archimedes. Although I suppose you _could_ argue that I quit that particular job, especially after I… well, quit."  
"Quite." Katie remarked, rolling her eyes. Honestly, I could never understand why people said that. What does it even mean, 'quite'? 'Quite right', 'Quite so', who knew? Then again, a lot of what people say these days makes no apparent sense. Never has really, has it?  
"Anyway, that reminds me." Katie continued, interrupting my tangential train of thought. "How long have you been wearing that uniform, exactly?"  
"Too long." I chuckled, thinking back to that fateful day back on the Archimedes. The day where it really had all began. "The nineteenth of March, twenty-three nineteen. Good lord, I haven't changed my clothes since twenty-three nineteen…"  
"Don't worry about it, Matthew…" Katie assured me. "Neither have I." We both chuckled slightly at this. Admittedly, it wasn't particularly funny, but it was nice to know that we could stay cheerful in times like these. After all, we, and particularly _I_ , had to keep our minds off of Xena. Heaven knows how close we were to the, finding her. Then it'd all be over just as quickly as it had begun… All of this, for nothing… Like I said, best not to think about it, eh?

A few moments later, Katie and I had finally reached the 'pedestrian' entrance to the Angelica. An enormous doorway, several metres wide, opened up into an airlock the size of a dining hall. Inside, hundreds upon hundreds of people were eagerly awaiting the opening of the interior door. We quickly hurried over to the doorway and hastily bundled ourselves into the huge but cramped chamber. If we didn't get in now, who knew how long it would be before the airlock opened again, to let the next batch of passengers in? As soon as we _had_ got in though, I quickly came to regret it. There was scarcely enough room to swing a _tadpole_ , let alone a cat. But if it got us aboard quicker, then it was our only choice. I found myself wondering for a moment or two why the Angelica had airlocks at all. It was never going to land anywhere, and pressure inside the ship would be 1G, as standard. Then I remembered what Katie had said earlier about Sedna's gravity being 1.4G, the strongest in the Solar System, and the whole thing made a lot more sense.  
"It's a bit tight in here, isn't it?" Katie asked, shouting over the clamor of voices around us.  
"You can say that again!" I replied, stumbling to one side as a man behind me accidentally elbowed me in the back. "At least it's not for long, though." No sooner than I had finished my sentence, a large red light on the ceiling began to flash. As if on cue, the enormous door which led back out onto the surface of Sedna began to close. The thick slab of brownish-grey metal slid from the roof to the ground, finally slamming with a mighty thud.

Seconds later, a loud hissing noise filled the room as the chamber began to depressurise. It's not often that an airlock has to depressurise to allow people _into_ a ship, but again, there was the whole 'Sedna has a high atmospheric pressure' thing going on. Soon, the hissing subsided, and the red flashing light on the ceiling went out. With a considerable rumble, the inner door of the airlock began to move. Finally, in just a few short moments, I'd have my first glimpse of the inside of the colossal vessel that was the Angelica. I didn't know what to expect, but I was actually quite excited deep down. It was just like the first time I ever went to Mars. I was only twelve then, but I knew at once that it was the life for me. All those other planets out there, just waiting for me to visit them. That's what inspired me to join Ashbridge Industries International. To get out there and see all those planets up close. I realised at that moment, of course, that that life was now well and truly over. This was where I'd spend the rest of my days now. I'd never set foot on a planet again. But as soon as that enormous airlock door had slid itself out of view, revealing the vast interior of the ship behind, I knew that I wouldn't have to. Because what was behind that door, what was that inside that ship, could _only_ be described as the surface of a planet.

The airlock opened out onto the dull grey concrete of a platform. A platform which belonged to a train station. Not a shuttle network, not a lift system. An actual, honest-to-God, _railway_ station. On a _spaceship_. I looked right down towards the ends of the long platforms, out into the distance, and I saw green. There were fields. Grass, trees, hedges, on a _spaceship_. I was amazed by what I saw. It was like stepping through a portal, from the immense concrete jungle of Sedna into this, this… beautiful countryside landscape. I'd never felt so at home as I did now, billions of miles way from it.  
"I… I've never seen so much colour in one place." Katie whispered to me, clearly just as awestruck as I was at the sight before us. Of course, she had lived on Sedna all her life. She'd never been to Earth, never seen such an extraordinary sight. But I had. And I can honestly say, hand on heart, that this place looked as if it was literally a piece that had been taken from the Earth. I knew at once that I was going to like it here. But, one thing at a time.  
"We need to get to the nearest registry office." I said, remembering the words printed on the bottom of each of our boarding passes.  
"But where's that?" Katie asked, a puzzled look on her face. Before I could answer her question, though, we were interrupted by a loud chiming of bells from the station's speaker system.

"This is an announcement for all new arrivals to the RCS Angelica." A soft female voice called across the speakers. "All passengers for Ike City Centre, please go to Platform 1. For Tinsworth, Headby and Sproxton-on-Malder, please go to Platform 2. For Gate Sigma, Platform 3. For Gate Upsilon, Platform 4. If you are unsure of your destination, please go to the Help Desk on the main station concourse."  
"There you go." I said, turning to Katie and shrugging my shoulders. "Does that answer your question?"  
"Well, considering my question was about the nearest registry office, no, no it doesn't." She replied bluntly.  
"Look, it's perfectly simple." I assured her. "There'll be a registry office in every major town. That means the nearest one is in Tinsworth."  
"What about the one in Ike?" She asked, although she soon realised how foolish _that_ suggestion was. The world and his wife would be going to the city centre, whereas much less people would be on their way into the countryside. And besides, we had to lay low. I kept telling her that, over and over again.  
"So, Platform 2 it is then?" She inquired, although I didn't have time to answer her on account of the fact that I had already started moving towards that particular platform. I was eager to get away from these crowds, to get out into the sticks, and see what this place was really like.

Twenty minutes or so later, Katie, Amanda, Xavier and I were all safely seated aboard a spacious, almost vacant railway carriage. The train had arrived just ten minutes after we had boarded the ship, and was just getting ready to leave the station as the train for Ike turned up at Platform 1.  
"See?" I said to Katie, gesturing towards the heavily crowded platform beside us. " _That_ is why we're going to Tinsworth, and not Ike." Katie wasn't listening at this point, though. She was looking around the carriage in bewilderment, her face alight with childlike curiosity.  
"It's like a little room on wheels, isn't it?" She remarked. I wasn't quite sure what she found so fascinating about it, until it suddenly struck me.  
"You've never been on a train before, have you?" I asked. "Or at least, not one like this."  
"No." She replied, still gazing around the grand carriage in amazement. "Maglevs, Transit cars, all the time. But never this."  
"They're very old fashioned. We had a few in England. Preserved lines, I mean." I explained, reminiscing once more of my home back on Earth. "They were all over the planet, in fact, back in the twenty-first century. But they never really took off on other planets, and eventually they were old news."  
"I like it." Katie told me with a smile. "It's a little bit of history, isn't it? Hundreds of years have gone by, and still, here we are. On a train. On a ship."

A couple of minutes later, the doors of the carriage finally slid closed. The grinding and screeching of metal on metal resounded from the rails below us, and the train slowly began to edge forwards out of the station. I gazed through the window, eager to see more of this rolling countryside that we would soon be living in. Needless to say, I was not disappointed. As the train rolled away from the platform, pulling out from under the shelter of the station canopy and into the open, I saw for the first time the true scale of the inside of the Angelica. To our left, fields stretched out into the distance for miles upon miles on end. Because the ground had no curvature like a planet had, there was no horizon. I could see right to the very end of the ship, where tall buildings and skyscrapers towered into the air, but were dwarfed by the thick grey wall behind them, which climbed impossibly into the sky. To our right, there were yet more fields, but in the distance, instead of a wall, there was a window. It must have been literally miles in length, spanning right across the front end of the ship, and through it, I could see the stars. It was as if it was both day and night simultaneously, as blindingly bright lights on the roof of the ship simulated sunlight shining down. The sky above was a bright blue, complete with rolling white clouds, past which the ceiling was completely invisible. In the distance though, a great curved wall emerged from the heavens, plummeting down towards the ground below. In all my life, I had never seen such an awe-inspiring landscape, and I think I can safely say that I never will again.

"I… I don't know what to say." I said with hesitation, staring out across the landscape distantly. "It's… It's amazing."  
"Is this what the Earth looked like, Matthew?" Katie asked, lost in a similar state of wonder and awe.  
"To a 'T'." I nodded, sighing heavily with a chuckle. "It's a spitting image, Katie. Trust me."  
"How could they destroy something as beautiful as this?" She continued, her tone becoming more cynical. "An entire planet like this. How could they just wave it all away?"  
"They did what they had to, Katie." I told her solemnly, although I shared her sentiment on the matter. "They did what they had to."  
"Matthew…" Katie began, taking a deep breath to compose herself before she continued. "Can I ask you something about Xena?"  
"Go on." I said reluctantly, as I was unsure where exactly she was planning on taking this conversation.  
"You've risked your life to save her, Matthew." She continued, looking down at the ground in thought. "You've done more for her than most people would do for their human partners. But why? What is it about her, Matthew? Why do you love her?"

"Look out of the window, Katie." I told her plainly. She did so, albeit reluctantly. "Tell me what you see out there."  
"I see…" She hesitated, unsure of just what I was expecting her to say. "I see the most beautiful sight I've ever seen."  
"That's how I feel when I look at Xena." I explained, chuckling at just how clichéd I sounded right now. " _She's_ the most beautiful sight _I've_ ever seen."  
"That's a very romantic thing to say, Matthew." Katie replied with an honest smile.  
"Thanks." I assured her, returning the expression warmly.  
"Very cheesy thing, too, though." She said bluntly. I simply stared at her for a couple of seconds, before both of us started to giggle childishly. She was right, of course. Whenever I spoke about Xena, I always came across sounding like some love-struck school girl. But it was the truth, and that was that.  
"Well…" I continued, composing myself once again. "I suppose I'm just a cheesy sort of bloke." Katie chuckled at this once again, as did I. And after that, we simply continued to chat, about everything and nothing, as the train slowly drifted across the countryside towards our destination. Soon, we'd arrive. We'd get our citizenship, we'd get our house, and then I could go back for Xena. I knew in that moment that everything was going to be just fine.


	9. Chapter 9

**NINE of THIRTY-TWO**

*NOTE – Ladies and gentlemen, the day has finally come! Yes, after their horrific tribulation, our heroic adventurers have finally reached the end of their epic journey. Or they would have done, if this wasn't the ninth chapter in a thirty-two chapter story. Yes, I am TheManFromMudos, and today I bring you another… well, I wouldn't say _exciting_ chapter, per se, but I have got another chapter of 'Xavier' for you. In this chapter, Matthew seems to think that his days of running away from people with guns have finally come to an end, but is he right? There's only one way to find out! I won't say too much, suffice to say that I'm sure you can hazard a guess at what may be still to come. So read on, and, as always, enjoy. It's 'Xavier'. THANK YOU!*

"What do you mean we don't qualify for citizenship?" I exclaimed, beginning to regret my previous assertion. Half an hour, _half a bloody hour_ we'd spent on that train, all before traipsing through the crowded interchange and the bustling town centre to the registry office. And then we'd had to queue. That's right, twenty minutes standing in line. All that, for what? For us to finally be told that we 'didn't qualify' for citizenship aboard the Angelica.  
"I'm very sorry, sir, but the law is clear." The woman behind the desk explained. "Citizenship will only be granted to those who provide a valid RCS Angelica Boarding Pass _and_ an Omicron Alpha Extrasolar Travel Passport." I simply sighed, and bit down on my lip before I said something irrational.  
"Look, I keep telling you, we _have_ our passports." I tried, producing mine from my left breast pocket and attempting to hand it to the woman. She simply held a hand up to push the small black book away, shaking her head as she did so.  
"Sir, I am well aware that you are in possession of _a_ passport." She explained. "But yours is issued by Ashbridge Industries International, and as such is only valid on Ashbridge Industries vessels. What's more, according to the database, you haven't renewed your passport for… twenty-eight years."

"Listen." I insisted. "We've been on long haul, we've just woken up from a twenty-three year stasis cycle. We _need_ a place on this ship."  
"I understand, sir." The woman assured me. "But there's nothing more I can do. That being said, there are other options available to you."  
"Such as?" I asked, shrugging my shoulders. I glanced at Katie, who was also beginning to tire of this ridiculous charade.  
"Well, there are two other ways in which citizenship may be granted to passengers." She explained. "The first and most doable option involves a series of examinations over a two-month period, after which your citizenship appeal will be _considered_ by the Angelican government."  
"And if we're rejected?" Katie interrupted. She too was becoming quite impatient at this point.  
"Then you will remain on the ship under immigrant status." The woman told us. "You will be denied the full rights of a citizen, such as free healthcare or the ability to vote, but will still have a legal right to live and work aboard the ship. Of course, you can always reapply for citizenship if you wish."  
"Shall we do it?" Katie asked, glancing at me inquisitively. I wasn't sure about her, but _I_ would prefer to have the full rights of an Angelican citizen.

"Well, doesn't look like we have much of a choice in the matter, does it?" I replied. "Just out of interest, though, how else can we obtain citizenship?"  
"How else?" The woman behind the desk repeated in confusion. "Oh, right. Yes, citizenship can also be granted without application to those who perform considerable acts of self-sacrifice for the good of the country. But as I said, there's a very slim chance that such an event would occur."  
"Of course." I nodded, although to be fair, it wasn't a possibility that we could totally rule out. Catastrophe seemed to follow me wherever I went.  
"In any case," The woman assured us, "I'll sign both of you up for the citizenship course, and we'll let you know by post when we need you to come in for examinations… which brings us to our next subject: housing. I presume that you have not booked any accommodation in advance?"  
"No… we haven't." I replied with a sigh. "We were in a bit of a rush to get here, I'm afraid."  
"That's quite alright, sir." The woman explained with a smile. "Here on the Angelica, we offer a wide variety of housing options. It all depends on your budget. Not to mention, of course, whether you'd prefer to be situated in an urban, suburban or rural area."  
"Definitely rural, please." Katie replied before I had a chance. She gave me a sincere nod, knowing that I was about to say the exact same thing. A rural area truly was our only option. _If_ , and this was a pretty hefty if, we had any chance of keeping Xena safe, we'd have to live somewhere remote. 

"I see." The woman behind the desk replied with a smile. "Prefer the quiet countryside to the big city buzz, eh?" Then, she quickly mashed some buttons on the keyboard in front of her, before stumbling upon the page that she was looking for, and turning the screen to show me and Katie.  
"These three houses are in the nearby village of Slast." She explained, gesturing towards the three images on the screen. "It's just a ten minute bus journey from here, and there's a small selection of shops, Post Office, et cetera. Great view through the front window, as well."  
"Sounds perfect." I remarked, imagining in my head an image of a tiny, picturesque village nestled between rolling green hills.  
"Now the first two are relatively inexpensive." The woman continued, scrolling down to the financial details of each house. "However, they only have two bedrooms each. This one, on the other hand, has three bedrooms, but as a result is a little more costly."  
"Oh, don't worry." I said with a smug grin. "Money's no object to us. Is it Katie?" Katie simply glared at me, unimpressed.  
"No, no..." She replied through gritted teeth, shaking her head slightly as she spoke. " _No object at all._ "  
"That's settled, then." I beamed, deliberately feigning enthusiasm. "We'll take the most expensive one, if you please."  
"Certainly, sir." The woman replied, handing me a small scrap of paper with the house's address etched onto it. "Well, that's as far as I can take you, I'm afraid. I'll send you over to Housing & Residence now to discuss your payment options."

"Thank you so much for all your help." I smiled, still trying to push forward the over-enthusiastic tone.  
"Matthew, can I talk to you for a moment?" Katie asked, dragging me away from the help desk by my collar. I pulled myself away from her surprisingly strong grasp for just long enough to catch a breath, but when I looked back at her, her expression had turned from one of annoyance to one of anger.  
"What the hell do you think you're doing, Matthew?!" She exclaimed, her deep brown eyes afire in her rage.  
"What's the problem, Miss Pennybags?" I replied sarcastically, but seeing the look on her face, I soon regretted it.  
"You know full well what the problem is, Matthew." She snapped. "I won't put up with you sponging off of me like this."  
"Sorry." I replied truthfully, my tone becoming more sincere. "But you know that that three-bedroom house is perfect for us."  
"That's as maybe." Katie remarked. "But from now on, _I'll_ decide how _my_ money is spent, if you don't mind."  
"Roger that." I agreed. "In which case, you won't mind if I go and get the van whilst you sort out payment for the house, then, will you?"  
"…Fine." She sighed, a little less than satisfied with this decision. "Make sure you've got the address, and we'll meet you there."  
"Alright." I replied, already making my way over to the door, eager to get out of this packed building. "See you later, then."  
"Yeah, whatever." She said, shaking her head with an ever-so-slight grin. "You go fetch your soulmate, eh?" I couldn't help but chuckle at this. And then, I was out the door, and into the street. Without any further hesitation, I walked off towards the train station, on my way back to Gate Tau at last.

"Xena?" I whispered, knocking against the back of the van with my hand. The knock echoed through the dark car park, which was lit only by the 'sunlight' through a row of tiny, rectangular windows behind me. To my dismay, there was no reply. But I still held on to a glimmer of hope.  
"Zee?" I asked again, and this time the door was slowly pushed ajar from inside. I heaved a huge sigh of relief when I realised that she was alright. Xena attempted to poke her head through the tiny crack, but I forced her back in, looking around cautiously to make sure nobody had seen her. My eyes fell upon a man stood beside his car nearby. He stared at me in confusion, obviously having heard me calling out names into my supposedly empty van.  
"My, uh… rabbit." I called out nervously, saying the first thing that popped into my head. The man simply turned away without a word.  
"Now listen, Zee." I whispered, poking my head into the dingy van. "Katie's sorting out a house as we speak. It's in the countryside, nice and safe." I took my head out again, and saw that the man was still standing nearby, now looking even more confused.  
"Our last rabbit got hit by a car." I lied, desperately trying to shake the eavesdropper. "But this one'll be safe in the countryside. Less roads, you know?" The man nodded silently, then turned away again. It was then that I decided that this wasn't the most private place to continue our conversation.  
"Look, Xena, I'll explain on the way." I told her, my voice as quiet as humanly possible at this point. "When there're less people about."

Walking around to the driver's side door, I clambered into the van. Xena attempted to climb over into the passenger seat, but I told her to wait until we were out into the countryside for that. I reached out to the gear stick beside me and pushed it into first, before carefully edging forwards out of the parking space. Then, I turned off to the right and drove off of the platform down a steep ramp until we reached the road below.  
"Now, Xena, let's just get a few things straight, shall we?" I began, glancing back over my shoulder at the terrified and intrigued Xenomorph. "This is the countryside, and I know you've never seen anything quite like it. But don't worry, alright? You'll be perfectly fine as long as you don't wander off." She looked at me in confusion at this statement, as if shocked by the very notion that she'd be allowed out of the house alone.  
"Well we can't keep you locked up forever, Zee." I told her, gazing out across the hills as I spoke. "Especially not in a place like this. But like I said, we have to be careful. Nobody can know that you're here. Understand?" She nodded solemnly, and then smiled. I returned the expression. At least Xena understood the danger that she was in. We were by no means free and clear, oh no. We'd have to watch our backs, day in and day out, for the rest of our lives. But at least, relatively speaking, we'd be safe here. And that was good enough for us.

As we continued to drive along down the quiet country roads, I took in the countryside around me with amazement. It truly was a beautiful place, with enormous fields of wheat and barley stretching off into the distance. Why fill ships with tightly packed bio-domes and compact planters when you could have real, actual fields? I knew that whatever happened, I was going to enjoy living here. It reminded me so much of England. Good old England, eh? That was gone now. Along with the rest of them. Every country, on every continent, wiped out in a single strike. And who was to blame? Me. I know that Katie kept telling me not to blame myself for what happened to the Earth, but how could I not? I could have done something. Anything.  
"Nearly there now, Zee." I announced, trying to distract myself from the morbid topic. In truth, I had no idea how far we had to go. A few minutes later, though, just as we had driven over the brow of a small hill, I saw it. A cluster of houses, clumped together in the centre of a mass of fields. There had to be less than a hundred buildings there, with two narrow, winding roads protruding from each end and meandering off in either direction.  
"Oh my God, that's it." I mumbled, gazing down at the tiny village in astonishment. "Xena, that's it! Slast. Our new home." Xena peered over my shoulder through the front windscreen, and beamed, as did I. This really was it. Our safe haven, from this day forth. I couldn't wait to get there.

It took just ten more minutes for us to reach the village of Slast. The van jostled and bumped around on the rough surface of the road beneath, but I ignored it. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the scrap of paper I had been given earlier, with our new address written on it. '25 Vernon Lane', it read. It wasn't long before I saw a sign denoting the street, and quickly turned to head down it. Driving right to the bottom, I looked for a door numbered '25', and pulled up outside. Almost immediately, the door was flung open, and Katie came running down the garden path towards me.  
"Matthew!" She called out happily, pulling open the van door for me "I was wondering when you'd get here."  
"You're awfully cheery, aren't you?" I asked, stepping out onto the curb. I looked back at Xena and gestured to her to wait a moment.  
"You need to see this place, Matthew." Katie explained, a huge grin on her face. "It's perfect!" And then, she turned around and ran back to the house.  
"Katie says the house is nice." I told Xena, climbing back into the van to back it into the driveway. "It better be… we're going to be here for a while." She simply nodded in agreement, and I found myself wondering once again just how long 'a while' would actually turn out to be.

"It does look pretty big…" I murmured, stepping out of the van once again and heading around the back to let Xena out. She immediately bolted towards the front door, diving through it before I could so much as blink. Not exactly what I'd call 'stealthy', but certainly fast. I strolled over to the doorway at a much slower pace, but didn't step inside. Instead, I simply stopped, dead in my tracks, and turned to look at my surroundings in more detail. I could still hardly believe that we were actually on board a spaceship. There was grass beneath my feet, there were clouds in the sky. There were even birds in the trees. Actual, living birds. It was almost surreal. Behind the house, a huge field sloped upwards over a steep hill, beyond which the ship's enormous concrete wall was visible. As the hill subsided, the mighty skyscrapers of Ike just poked their way into view. On the opposite side, the vast window at the front of the ship loomed over us, much closer now than it had been back in Tinsworth. The whole thing was so… perfect. Honestly, it was just incomprehensibly picturesque. And we were going to live here. We who had traveled for twenty-three years in search of sanctuary had finally found it. We were safe. Home free. Our ordeal had come to its eventual end, and from now until the day that each of us died, we could sleep soundly at night, safe in the knowledge that we had done it. We had won. And it felt great.


	10. Chapter 10

**TEN of THIRTY-TWO**

*NOTE – Hello everybody, it's me, TheManFromMudos, and today I'm back with another chapter of 'Xavier'. Now, from this point forward, things are going to be very different. You see, the first nine chapters were almost a backstory in many ways, merely setting things up for the real story by explaining how Matthew and the crew got from the Andromeda to the Angelica. Now, the true narrative begins. Matthew, Xena, Katie and the kids have settled down into their new lives aboard the RCS Angelica, and we can finally get underway with the meat and potatoes of the story, so to speak. I won't keep you any longer, as I fear I've said too much already. What I will say, though, is this: Read on, and please enjoy. It's 'Xavier'. THANK YOU!*

"Matthew!" Katie called out loudly, abruptly awakening me to the sound of crying children. "There's no milk!" I heaved a deep sigh, and sat upright.  
"Can't you go?" I shouted back, stretching my arms out with a groan. I looked down at Xena, who still slept soundly beside me. Lucky for some.  
"I'm watching the babies!" She replied, her voice hoarse on account of the fact that she'd been up all night. "And you know Xena can't go!"  
"Then I'll wake Xena up and she can watch the kids while you go to the shop!" I called, attempting to negotiate a few more minutes in bed. Big mistake.  
"Matthew Jones, don't you dare!" Katie shouted angrily. "You let her sleep, you hear me? Now get down here and go and buy some fucking milk!"  
"Yes, mother." I replied sarcastically, heaving myself up onto my feet and stumbling over to the wardrobe. 'I don't think I can cope with this for another two years,' I thought to myself. We'd been here for just two weeks, two glorious weeks, and already I wanted to rip my own hair out. If Amanda wasn't crying, Xavier was. If Xavier wasn't crying, Amanda was. If neither of them were crying, _I_ was crying. Oh, the joys of being a parent.

Drearily, I pulled open the enormous wardrobe and reached into it, producing a blue checkered shirt, a pair of grey jeans and braces. Katie, of course, had insisted that we go shopping for clothes a couple of days after we'd arrived, so at least now I had a bit more choice in what I wore. I quickly pulled the shirt over my head, and the jeans up my legs, and slid the braces over my shoulders, before hurrying out of the room and down the stairs.  
"Oh, here's the man of the house himself." Katie announced mockingly, rolling her eyes as she rocked Amanda in her arms. "Sleep well, did we?"  
"Hardly." I replied bluntly, walking straight past her towards the front porch. I was in no mood for petty, childish remarks at this time in the morning.  
"Milk, bread and gravy granules." She continued as I walked back into the living room and sat down to put my shoes on. "Money's on the table."  
"Sure we don't need anything else while I'm out?" I asked, reaching for a tattered ten dollar bill that rested on the coffee table in front of me. When she didn't reply after a rather awkward pause, I presumed that this was indeed everything that we needed at this particular moment in time. And so, with a quick 'won't be long' to Katie, I got back to my feet, made my way over to the porch, and pulled open the front door, before stepping out into the garden.

The sun shone down like an enormous light bulb as I made my way down the garden path towards the street. This was, of course, because the 'sun' aboard the Angelica _was_ an enormous light bulb. It ran the entire length of the ship (seventy-two miles, as I had recently discovered), and slowly dimmed in the evenings, before going out at night, simulating a real daylight cycle. The bulb itself wasn't actually visible, though, nor was the ceiling around it, some twelve miles above our heads. In fact, if you followed the wall with your eyes, up into the clouds, you would find that it inexplicably faded away into nothingness about eight miles up. Then there were the clouds. They were generated by huge evaporators placed at strategic points across the country, and although they were actually made from pure water vapor rather than the usual salt water found in natural clouds, the rain felt just as real as I remembered it from back on Earth. There really had been no holds barred in making this ship as Earth-like as possible. That being said, I still got this uneasy feeling every now and then. 'How easily could this ship be destroyed?' I kept thinking. 'Earth was destroyed, and it was tens of thousands of times bigger than this little country-in-a-can, wasn't it?' I pushed these thoughts to the back of my mind, though, chalking it up to simple paranoia.

It was only a short walk down the street on which we now lived to the local shops. They were few in numbers, to say the least, and only one of them was an actual 'convenience store', but there was also a Chinese take-away, an antiques dealer and a Post Office. Directly in front of this unusual selection of shops, there was a bus stop, at which buses typically arrived every half an hour, or every hour on Sundays. This skeleton timetable didn't bother us, though, as we had our own transport, albeit in the form of a two-seater Antorani Erinome which was probably twelve years past it's last MOT date. Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked. The point is that there was a bus stop, and behind the bus stop were the shops. And it was in one of those shops that I, in just a few short minutes time, would purchase a bottle of milk, a loaf of bread and some gravy granules, which I would then pay for with the ten dollar bill that Katie had so graciously given to me. Interestingly enough, the symbol on the note was similar in appearance to that of a pound, but it had the same vertical lines running through it that a dollar sign had. Even more bizarrely, I had recently discovered that the dollar was subdivided into coins called _pence_ , not _cents_ , and that there were only eighty pence in a dollar! That's right, twenty-fourth century Sedna and the currency wasn't even decimalised.

A moment or two later, reaching the entrance to the shop, I pushed open the simple wooden door and stepped inside. The place was empty, of course, as it was still quite early in the morning. Even the shopkeeper was nowhere to be seen, although I assumed he was probably in the back taking stock or something, as I could hear the clattering of tin cans being stacked upon one another. I quietly made my way towards the fridges at the bottom of the aisle directly in front of me, in which milk and other dairy items were usually kept. Silently pulling out the largest bottle of milk I could find, I walked around the corner and up the next aisle, where I found a jar of coffee. I grabbed some tea bags as well, since I greatly preferred tea to coffee, something which sadly couldn't be said for Katie. Finally, I rounded another corner, and then another, onto the shop's fourth and final aisle. Scanning the shelves from top to bottom, I eventually found the gravy granules, and plucked them from their position beside the less popular, although equally flavoursome, gravy stock cubes. All I had to do now was head over to the till and pay, before going home to inevitably repeat the process two or three more times today. Yes, this was the life I now led. Once an action-packed rollercoaster of adventure and excitement, now nothing more than a constant cycle of going to the shop, and then going back home, over and over again. Indefinitely…

"Sorry, mate." The shopkeeper called, suddenly running up to the counter from the room behind. He quickly took the handful of items that I had collected and swiped each of them with a barcode scanner. Milk – A dollar twenty. Coffee- A dollar thirty-eight. Gravy granules – A dollar six.  
"That's… three dollars and sixty-four pence, please." The shopkeeper announced as he slid the gravy granules into a plastic bag alongside the milk and coffee. I handed him the humble ten dollars that Katie had so kindly allowed me to spend, and a few moments later, he passed me a handful of change in return, namely a five dollar coin, a one dollar coin, and several four pence pieces. Stuffing the change into my pocket, I lifted the plastic bag from the counter before me, and was just about to leave when the door opened, and two elderly women walked into the shop, chatting loudly to one another.  
"Well, it's outrageous, isn't it?" One of the women said, her voice slightly croaky and hoarse. "And it's not as if anybody's doing anything about it."  
"No, but what can they do?" The second woman replied. I could tell by her much clearer voice that she was a few years younger than her counterpart.  
"Well someone has to do something." The first woman demanded. "I mean, Anne…it could be one of _us_ next." That was when I became _really_ intrigued.

"I know what you mean, Susan." The second woman agreed. "It happened to Mavis' son a few days ago. The whole family's devastated." Their voices became harder to hear then, as they rounded the corner at the end of the first aisle. Reluctantly, I followed them, eager to hear more of their conversation.  
"Did they tell the police?" The first woman, who's name I now knew to be Susan, asked as she pulled a tin of baked beans from a nearby shelf.  
"Of course they did." Anne assured her, nodding as she spoke. "They said they'd see what they could do, but things are busy at the moment."  
"Well, it's been happening across the country, hasn't it?" Susan remarked. "I'm surprised the government hasn't even acknowledged it."  
"I thought that seemed odd, too." Anne agreed, leaning down to pick up a box of cereal. I was less than three feet behind the two women at this point.  
"Excuse me?" I announced, unable to simply stand back and listen any longer. The two women turned on their heels instantly, shocked by my presence.  
"Yes, love?" Anne replied, smiling warmly, the way old ladies often do. Susan, on the other hand, had a much sourer, more world-weary face.  
"I was just wondering what you ladies were talking about?" I explained, doing my best to return a comforting smile and not look like a stalker.

"Well…" The kindly woman began, looking around cautiously as if she was about to disclose some highly confidential information. "I-"  
"Look, Anne, I've got to go." Susan interrupted abruptly. "My appointment's in half an hour and I don't want to miss the bus."  
"Alright, Sue. I'll pop round for a cuppa later, eh?" Anne called as Susan ambled her way over to the counter. "I'm sorry about her, love. She's a bit more uptight than myself, you see. Mind you, I've known here since I was your age. Before that, even. She's a few years older than me, though. In fact, I think she's-"  
"You were saying?" I interrupted slightly impatiently. As much as I was enthralled by this… gripping tale, there were more pressing matters at hand right now.  
"Oh, sorry my dear, I didn't notice I was rambling." She chuckled. "Well, it's like this, you see. I have a friend called Mavis, she lives in the next village over. Lovely little place, next to the River Malder, you know. Anyway, she rang me the other day, she was sobbing her eyes out, I tell you. So I said 'What's wrong, Mavis? Why are you crying?' And then she told me. Well, her eldest son's only gone missing in the middle of the night, hasn't he?"  
"Missing?" I asked, furrowing my brow in confusion. "What do you mean 'missing'? Did her run off, was he kidnapped?" 

"Well, that's just it, isn't it?" Anne remarked, shrugging her shoulders. "I mean, you've got to think, haven't you: Who'd kidnap a forty-three year old man from a little village in the middle of nowhere? But there's more. Because Mavis' grandson, who also lives with them, says he got up for a drink of water in the middle of the night and heard people moving about. Next thing you know, he's running into Mavis' room crying his eyes out, screaming that he's seen these strange men in blue hazard suits dragging his dad of the house." My jaw dropped at this. I could hardly believe my ears. Strange men in blue hazard suits? Dragging a little boy's dad away? This was clearly more than just a kidnapping. I had to know more.  
"And the police haven't done anything about it?" I asked, thinking back to the conversation I had overheard between Anne and Susan moments earlier.  
"Not a thing." Anne replied, shaking her head as she spoke. "And you know why, don't you? It's because they're as clueless as we are! This has been happening up and down the country ever since the ship took off. Rumour has it that there's four or five a night disappearing in the city. It's in all the local papers. And yet, the national media hasn't even acknowledged that there's anything going on."

I continued to run through everything Anne had told me in my head for several moments. It just didn't make any sense at all. Dozens of people were disappearing every week, and the police weren't doing anything about it? The government, and the ship's military, weren't doing anything about it?  
"Why?" I asked aloud, more confused now than I had been before, when I was simply listening into the conversation without any context.  
"Don't ask me." Anne replied, shrugging her shoulders. "Sounds like organised crime, though. And on a large scale, at that. But there are loads of organisations with research facilities on this ship. Kovacs Extrasolar Solutions, the Montreal Technical Association. Anyone could be behind it."  
"Yeah…" I said distantly, lost in deep thought. "Anyone…" I looked over Anne's shoulder as I spoke, and saw a newspaper on a nearby rack with the headline 'Tinsworth Woman Vanishes – Again'. The one beside it read 'Two Kidnapped in Headby in Single Night'. Suddenly, this rush of emotions washed over me. I was fearful and worried, yet strangely intrigued. So many questions buzzed around my head. Who was behind this? Why were they doing it? Could one of us be next? But most of all, somewhere deep down, although I'm ashamed to admit it, I was excited.


	11. Chapter 11

**ELEVEN of THIRTY-TWO**

*NOTE – Hello everybody, it's me, TheManFromMudos, and today I'm bringing you another long-awaited chapter of 'Xavier'. As always, I'm sort I haven't uploaded for a while, but I do have a genuine reason for it this time. You see, I've been very busy recently sorting stuff out for university, for which I will be leaving home in just a few short weeks. I'm hoping it won't affect my upload schedule too much (if you can even call it a 'schedule' at this point), but just in case, I'm going to try and upload as many new chapters as possible before I go. So, here's one for you now. I won't say much more, other than 'read on and enjoy', but of course you already knew that I was going to say _that_. It's 'Xavier'. THANK YOU!*

It took several moments for me to realise that I'd completely zoned out of my conversation with the elderly woman in front of me. I was still trying to make some sense of what was going on here. People being snatched in the night by lab workers? The police helpless to assist? Who could be behind all of this? Finally, a few more long moments of thinking later, I decided that there was only one way to find out. I'd have to investigate things for myself.  
"Excuse me, erm… Anne." I said hastily, already stepping away from the woman as I spoke. "I've got a few… errands to run. Nice talking to you."  
"You too, love…" She replied, smiling warmly as I turned to leave. "And let me know if you find anything!" I had turned away from her at this point, but looked back when she said this. It was as if she'd read my mind. Then again, it didn't take a genius to figure out what I meant by 'errands', did it?  
"I'm just intrigued, that's all." I said with a grin, although I think she knew as well as I did that it was more than just idle curiosity.  
"Just don't go getting yourself into unnecessary danger, eh?" Anne chuckled, although there was an air of sincerity in her voice.  
"Wouldn't dream of it." I said jokingly. Then, with a quick wave, I turned on my heels and walked away from her, hastily making my way to the door.

As I stepped out onto the street outside the shop, gently pulling the door behind me shut, questions continued to circulate in my head. Now, though, I wasn't thinking about _who_ could be behind the disappearances. Instead, I was thinking about how _I_ was going to find out who was behind them. It was going to take more than an eyewitness report from Anne's friend's grandson to solve this mystery. And more importantly, I had to tell Xena and Katie. For all we knew, these people could be at our door next. They could take any one of us. Or worse still, they could take _all_ of us, if they found out that one of us just so happened to be a Xenomorph, whose existence I was given to understand was public knowledge at this point. But I wasn't going to let that happen. I was going to find out who was behind all this. And, of course, I was going to put a stop to it. Well, _try_ to put a stop to it. In truth, I was in way above my head before I'd even begun. This was a significant step up from Goddard trying to sneak an unborn Xenomorph back to Earth on the Archimedes, after all. Nevertheless, someone had to do something, because clearly the police, and even the government, didn't seem to be bothered. In an ideal world, some kind of detective, a Sherlock Holmes-type character, would step in and save the day. But I think I could manage it in a pinch.

It took little more than two minutes for me to get back to the house from the shop, traveling at a light jog as opposed to the slow walk I'd taken to get there. I marched straight up the garden path and burst through the front door with considerable urgency. Then, I made my way into the kitchen, and placed the bag of groceries on the worktop, where two empty mugs were waiting beside a freshly boiled kettle. No sooner than I had begun taking things out of the bag, I heard footsteps behind me, and turned around to see Katie. She walked past me drearily, snatching the jar of coffee from my hands without a word and pulling off the lid before spooning the granules unsparingly into the two mugs in front of her.  
"Oh, Xena doesn't want one, does she?" She asked with a yawn, putting down the coffee jar and reaching for the sugar as she spoke.  
"She doesn't like coffee." I replied, shaking my head. "She's a tea drinker. As, though I'm sure you'll recall, am I." I gestured to one of the mugs, which she picked up with a scowl, tipping its contents back into the jar and replacing them with a fresh tea bag. Much better.  
"Anyway," I said quickly, suddenly remembering the important news I had to share. "You'll never guess what I've just heard down at the shops."

"What?" Katie mumbled, pouring boiling water carefully into the mugs. "No, don't tell me. All the cows on the ship have inexplicably died overnight."  
"What? No." I replied, shaking my head in confusion at this bizarre remark.  
"Oh, well in that case, you've bought some milk, then." She continued sarcastically, stirring the filled mugs with a teaspoon as she spoke.  
"Ah! Yeah, it's here." I replied, rolling my eyes at her unsuccessful attempt at humour as I handed her the bottle. "Anyway, I'm being serious, Katie. I've just been talking to a woman in the shop. She was telling me about her friend who lives in the next village. Her son disappeared a few nights ago."  
"Disappeared?" Katie repeated, looking at me with a furrowed brow. "And they haven't found him?"  
"Well that's rather the problem with people who disappear, isn't it?" I replied bluntly, shooting her an annoyed glance.  
"Sorry." She said sarcastically, returning an equally unimpressed expression. "Anyway, carry on. Woman's friend, next village, son disappears."  
"Right, so." I continued dramatically. "Listen to this: _His_ son, her grandson, reckons he saw his dad being dragged away by people in hazard suits."

"Hazard suits?" Katie asked in confusion. Lifting her mug of coffee from the kitchen side, she made her way into the living room, as did I.  
"That's what he said." I explained, sitting down on the sofa as I spoke. "He got up for a drink of water in the middle of the night, and there's his dad, kicking and screaming as he's dragged away by men in hazard suits. But that's not all. Apparently, it's been happening all over the ship."  
"And nobody's doing anything about it?" Katie asked, taking a sip of her coffee as she reached out for the television remote.  
"Exactly." I nodded, foolishly attempting to sip at my own scalding drink. "The police can't help, and the government won't even acknowledge the problem."  
"Weird…" Katie said distantly, already losing interest in the conversation at hand and instead focusing her attention on whatever was on the telly. I glared at her in annoyance, though of course she didn't take any notice. Honestly, sometimes I didn't know why I even bothered trying to hold a conversation with this woman at all. Luckily, the awkward silence that then ensued as Katie continued to stare silently into the television before her was quickly broken by the sound of heavy footsteps coming down the stairs. At last, someone who might actually listen to me for a change.

"Morning, Zee." I called to Xena as she reached the foot of the stairs, ducking to avoid the low overhang, and stepped into the living room drearily.  
"Morning, Xena." Katie said distantly, still focused on the telly more than anything else in the room. "Sleep well?" Xena shook her head in response.  
"Have some breakfast, you'll be fine." I assured her with a smile. She simply nodded, before ambling over to the kitchen and disappearing into it. With that, I immediately returned my attention to Katie, insistent that she listened to what I had to say.  
"Look, Katie," I began, speaking slightly louder to get her attention. "I don't think you understand the severity of the situation. People are being _kidnapped_ by men in hazard suits. Nobody is doing _anything_ about it. Doesn't that seem just a little bit odd to you?"  
"Perhaps." She replied, shrugging her shoulders indifferently as she spoke. "But why are you telling _me_ all of this, Matthew?"  
"Katie, dozens of people are going missing every night, and it's not even national news." I told her. "Why do you think I'm telling you all of this?" She fell silent for a moment, genuinely puzzled. However, her face soon fell as she realised that there was only one logical explanation.

"Oh, no." She said sternly, shaking her head. "You don't seriously think… Xena, you'd better come in here and talk some sense into your partner!"  
"Katie, listen to me." I explained, trying to make her see things the way I did. "This is _big_. I mean, one of us could be next. Someone has to do something."  
"I don't care." She replied sincerely, glaring at me as she spoke. "We've been through hell and high water to get to where we are now, Matthew. We're _safe_. We're _happy_. Are you seriously telling me you want to throw all of that away by getting involved in something that doesn't concern you?"  
"But it does concern me, Katie!" I insisted, raising my voice slightly. "I need to know who's behind this!" Katie simply continued to shake her head in disapproval. It was at this point that Xena walked back into the room, clutching a tiny bowl of cereal in her enormous hands.  
"Oh, thank God you're here, Xena!" Katie exclaimed loudly, glaring at me once again as she did so. "Now, would you kindly tell young Matthew here that he's completely out of his mind?" Xena simply looked at me in confusion, and shrugged her shoulders.  
"Allow me to explain." She continued bluntly. "Matthew here wishes to launch a one-man investigation into the wonderful world of organised crime."

"It's not like that, Xena…" I said slowly, but she was already glaring at me in the same condescending fashion as Katie was at this point.  
"Then what is it like, Matthew?" Katie asked, smiling slyly as she believed she'd outwitted me.  
"Well…" I said hesitantly, quickly discovering that in actual fact, she had. "Yeah, that's pretty much it."  
"You see, Xena?" Katie continued, gesturing towards me with a disappointed look on her face. "I'm telling you, he's just going to put us all in danger."  
"No, I'm not!" I insisted sternly, although it came out sounding rather childish. "Look, Xena, let _me_ explain. There have been a lot of disappearances aboard the ship recently. Now if what I heard in the shop is true, they're more than just disappearances. They're kidnappings. And when sixty or more people are being kidnapped in a single week, you can't expect me to just sit idly by and let it happen. Do you understand where I'm coming from?" Xena nodded slowly, but still had a concerned look on her face. She agreed with what I was saying, but, like Katie, she was also worried about me.  
"Trust me, Xena. And you too, Katie." I assured them both gently. "I'm not going to put us in any danger. I just want to find out what's going on."

"I hope you're right, Matthew." Katie mumbled, taking another sip of her coffee as she returned her attention back to the television once again.  
"Let's just forget about it for now, shall we?" I said calmly, sighing heavily as I spoke. "Anyway, put the news on, would you, Katie?" She didn't offer a verbal reply to this, but picked up the remote hesitantly and flicked the channel over. As the news began to start, and the logo of the Angelican Broadcasting Network flashing up on screen, we all fell silent, and Xena came to join us in the living room, slumping onto the sofa beside Katie.  
"Hello, and welcome to ABN Morning News." A monotonous voice droned as the newsreader appeared on screen. "Our top stories today: Science - A-Space officials reveal their plans to test the Angelica's light speed capabilities. The company expects a Light-19 attempt to take place this December. Sport – Groundwork has been layed for Angelica's first official sporting tournament, a Martian Tennis championship. Construction of a stadium in Ike is already underway. But fans of the sport say that it won't be the same, without teams from Mars competing."  
"Damn right, too." Katie said aloud. Xena and I simply looked at her in confusion. I had no idea she was a fan of Martian Tennis. Personally, I hated it.

"And finally, Law and Order." The newsreader continued. "Police issue an official warning as a rogue KT series synthetic, first reported missing by the FCME several years ago, which was recently sighted on the streets of Sedna, is believed to have made its way aboard the Angelica. Officials say the android may be highly dangerous, and anyone with information regarding the unit's whereabouts should contact the authorities immediately."  
"Missing synthetic, eh?" I thought aloud. Now that was an intriguing bit of news. And all the way from Luna? (In case you weren't aware of this already, the FCME was the Freed Colonies of the Moon of Earth, although its citizens preferred the satellite to be referred to as 'Luna'.)  
"Don't tell me you're going to go looking for _that_ as well?" Katie remarked sarcastically. I simply shook my head in response. After this, the newsreader continued to drone on about the finer details of each story, although at this point I had lost interest. I simply slouched back in my chair and sighed. The room fell silent then, for several minutes. Katie continued to sip at her coffee every now and then, and Xena slowly crunched away at her breakfast cereal. Soon, though, something broke the still air of the quiet room. It sounded somewhat like a cough. And it came from Xena.

At first, she coughed quietly, two or three times in quick succession. Soon, though, it became much louder, and turned into a hacking cough.  
"You alright, Xena?" Katie asked, patting her on the back as she continued to cough violently. She shook her head frantically.  
"Hey, the food's not that bad!" I remarked jokingly, although I could see that this was more than a piece of cereal stuck in her throat. She was wheezing between each breath now, almost like a smoker's cough. Katie and I both exchanged worried expressions.  
"Come on, cough it up." Katie told Xena, striking her back with considerable force now. Finally, she swallowed, and her coughing stopped, although she continued to breathe heavily. She put the unfinished bowl of cereal down in front of her, and thumped a fist against her throat as she cleared it.  
"Are you alright?" I asked, my tone apologetic after my previous sarcastic remark. Xena nodded her head, smiling weakly.  
"Do you want the rest of that cereal?" Katie asked, to which Xena shook her head in response. I think she'd been put off her breakfast now. And just like that, the room fell silent once again, leaving me to lose myself in my thoughts. Of course, my thoughts now dwelled on Xena more than anything else. I was suddenly very worried about her. Perhaps it had been nothing more than a tickle in the throat, a piece of cereal that got stuck on the way down. But I wasn't so sure about that. I'd never heard Xena cough before, and it had sounded pretty violent. I could only hope she wasn't falling ill.


	12. Chapter 12

**TWELVE of THIRTY-TWO**

*UPDATE – Hello everybody, it's me, TheManFromMudos, and today I bring good news! So, yesterday, as you may recall, if of course you're reading this at the time of writing, I posted the first half of this chapter, and explained to you that regrettably, I was having trouble with my laptop. Just after uploading that chapter, though, I considered whether one of my new house-mates might be willing to allow me to use _their_ laptop for writing, at least for the time being. I was reluctant to ask at first, but lo and behold, one of them was gracious enough to allow me a quick hour to finish off the writing of this chapter. So here you go! It's complete, and hopefully the next one will be written soon, so please, get stuck in. Also, don't forget that you can now read Matthew Jones' entire Record of Service on my profile page. Every ship that Matt's ever served on, compiled into a single, handy list! If you're interested, feel free to take a look, and in the meantime, here's the _complete_ twelfth chapter. It's still a little shorter than most, but thankfully this foreword takes the word count _just_ up to my chapter target of two-thousand five-hundred! So, read on and enjoy. It's 'Xavier'. THANK YOU!*

The rest of the day was uneventful, to say the least. Katie busied herself cleaning the house, Xena watched over the children, and I cooked. For dinner, steak and kidney pie, and for tea, a pasta bake. Then, as the evening drew in, we all gathered round the television and watched... soaps. Katie loved them, it seemed, although of course she'd spent the last fortnight watching in confusion as the characters she'd known twenty-three years ago had either been killed off or replaced. Personally, I hated it when that happened. Just when you get to know a character, they kick the bucket, and the writers come up with some almost-identical-but-not-quite-the-same replacement. Anyway, the soaps dragged on until nine o'clock, after which late night television saw us through the night. I finally got up to go to bed at about eleven o'clock, shortly followed by Xena. I don't know what time Katie came up, but it must have been quite late, because I didn't fall asleep until gone midnight, and she was still downstairs. Once I _had_ finally gotten to sleep, though, the night passed relatively soundly, with me only being woken up once or twice by Xena's ribcage digging into my back. Still, I couldn't complain. I knew what I was getting myself into when I dragged her dead carcass over to the Constantinople twenty-three years ago. Oh, the things one does for love…

The next morning, I was up bright and early as usual, thanks in part to the wonderful alarm clock that I was proud to call my son. He and Amanda were bawling loudly as always, and Katie was quick to wake me up and get me to deal with it. I clambered out of bed drearily, and after drudgingly dragging myself down the stairs, I wandered into the kitchen to whip up two bottles of baby milk. No sooner than I had done this, Katie came waltzing in with a smug grin plastered across her face. I was glad she found amusement from all of this, because I certainly didn't.  
"Look at you, eh?" She teetered mockingly as she set about making herself some cereal. "'Matthew Jones – Stay at Home Dad'. Suits you, doesn't it?"  
"I've told you, Katie, I _am_ looking for a job." I insisted, glaring at her begrudgingly. "And then all of these glorious duties'll be left to you and Xena."  
"Oh, come on, Matthew." She frowned, raising her eyebrows slightly. "There's only one thing you're looking for, and that's trouble."  
"Not trouble. Answers." I explained, yawning loudly as I did so. "Something's afoot, Katie, and I need to know what." She simply shook her head in disapproval at this. I got the feeling that neither Katie nor Xena wanted me getting involved in something as big as this.  
"Well anyway, you can't do that today, because I need you to run some errands." Katie told me with a mouthful of cereal, before taking her bowl from the kitchen side and walking out into the living room. Hesitantly, I picked up the two baby bottles and followed her.

"Run some errands?" I repeated, shocked by the very notion. "There are people being kidnapped across the ship at a rate of dozens per night, possibly being tortured or experimented upon _as we speak_ , and you need me to 'run some errands'?"  
"Yeah." Katie replied flatly. "Look, Matthew, I appreciate the fact that you want to help solve this… mystery, or whatever you want to call it. But right now, you need to help _us_. Remember us? Me, your girlfriend, two children? You need to wake up and realise, Matthew, that life is _not_ some kind of sci-fi fantasy, and you're not the main character. So buck your ideas up, get changed, and go shopping."  
"Shopping?" I scoffed with derision. The sheer humiliation. Me, a hardened veteran of interplanetary travel, reduced to the family work horse.  
"And after that, you can take these forms I've filled out to the Registry Office." Katie continued, ignoring my snide response. "Unless, of course, you'd prefer to spend the rest of your life aboard this ship as an immigrant? Because let me tell you something, Jones, I _don't_."  
"Alright…" I said impatiently, finally accepting Katie's demands. "Alright. And is that all? No other odd-jobs you want me around for?"  
"Well, now that you mention it, the kitchen sink hasn't been draining properly for the last couple of days." She remarked. I had to bite my lip at this. 

"Plumbing?" I said calmly, although my fists were now clenched tightly around the two bottles I still held in my hands. "You expect _me_ to do the plumbing?"  
"Well, I assumed you'd have some knowledge of it, Matthew." Katie replied plainly. "You were a Technician on the Aristotle, weren't you?"  
"It was the Archimedes and I was a Senior Navigational Officer!" I snapped loudly. At this point, my grip on the baby bottles had become such that the lids popped clean off, and warm milk began to run through my fingers. Katie stared at me in both surprise and thinly-veiled disgust.  
"You might want to get some fresh milk, Matthew." She uttered sternly. "And probably some fresh air, too."  
"You're right." I replied in a slight daze as I wandered away into the kitchen quietly. "Some fresh air, that's all I need. A nice, quiet walk." On the inside, though, my blood was boiling. I couldn't stand living like this for much longer. My place was out amongst the stars, billions of miles into deep space, with the universe itself on my doorstep. Not cooped up in here, with… kids, and responsibilities. Maybe Katie was right. Maybe that was the real reason that I was so eager to involve myself with the first bit of potential action that I could find.

Arriving in the kitchen, I continued to ponder over this notion as I tipped away the last of the warm milk from the two baby bottles down the sink. As the white liquid slowly drained away down the plughole, the pipes gurgled loudly. Katie was right, someone did need to look at the plumbing. But come on, what do I know about that stuff? 'A Technician on the Aristotle'? I was certain that she'd said that just to grind my gears. Anyway, as the last of the milk gurgled it's way down the pipes, I took the two bottles and quickly topped them up with fresh milk, making sure to replace the lids carefully. Then, after gathering my bearings, taking a few deep breaths, and heaving an even deeper sigh, I walked back into the living room with the bottles in hand. I silently wandered across the room, past Katie, and to the foot of the stairs as calmly as possible, refusing to show any further signs of anger or frustration. I don't know if she was convinced or not, but she didn't say anything, so it was fine. I silently made my way up the stairs then, steadily carrying the bottles in front of me, and turned into the kids' bedroom without a sound. I knew, though, that as soon as I went back downstairs, I'd have to face Katie again. What would she say? What would _I_ say? I'd snapped, plain and simple. Was she starting to think that I wasn't stable? _Wasn't_ I stable?

After taking a few deep breaths, I walked over to the far side of the bedroom, where Xavier and Amanda each had a cot. For a few moments, I simply gazed down at them. My children. Alright, so neither of them were biologically related to me. But I was responsible for these children. I was responsible, from now on, for making sure that they lived happy, healthy childhoods, and that they'd one day grow up to be good, honest people. How could I do that if I was busy chasing down mystery? If I was out searching for trouble, and without any leads, at that? Anyway, I suddenly came back to my senses, and remembered that at this particular moment, I was standing over them, with a bottle of warm baby's milk each. I carefully lifted Xavier from his cot, and he opened his weary eyes to see what was going on. Was I a complete stranger to him? Would his own father have seemed like a complete stranger to someone too young to understand? Either way, he was here now, and I was going to look after him. I sat down on a small stool beside the two cots, cradled him in one arm, carefully holding the bottle to his mouth with the other, and he begin to drink. And a few moments later, I did the same with Amanda. Again, she wasn't mine. She was Katie's child. But with her partner gone, probably dead in the Constantinople explosion, I would have to be the father figure in _her_ life, too. Which meant that I had a whole lot to learn, and a whole lot of responsibility on my shoulders.

Ten minutes or so later, after gently feeding Xavier and Amanda the last of the warm milk, I knew that it was time to go back downstairs. It was time to face Katie, to tell her straight what had happened, and why I'd snapped. This life, this environment, it was all new to me. Nobody's ever ready to become a parent, but nobody could be _less_ ready than I was. And owning a house, paying taxes and bills, going shopping, just generally living an ordinary life. I wasn't used to it. I hadn't lived in a house, a real, proper, actual house since I was eighteen. I'd spent so much of my life since then in space, where you don't pay for your house, or your food, or your utilities. Re-integrating into society was going to be an uphill battle, to say the least. Now, if only I could say all that to Katie, exactly as I wanted to. Would she understand? Or would she say that I was overreacting, and that I needed to man up and take responsibility for myself? Reluctantly, I decided that there was only one way to find out. Standing up slowly, and taking one last look around the children's bedroom, I made my way out into the landing, and towards the stairs, and walked down to the living room quietly. Katie still sat silently on the sofa, a half-empty cup of coffee in her hands. I approached her slowly, and cleared my throat to let her know that I'd returned.

"Sorry for getting so worked up." I mumbled, slumping onto the sofa beside her. "I just snapped. This isn't the life I'm used to, Katie."  
"I know." She replied warmly. "I know. But you'll have to _get_ used to it from now on. Remember, you were the one who wanted to settle down, weren't you? To find a nice, quiet place where we'd all be safe? And think about Xena. You want to keep a low profile, for her sake, don't you?"  
"You're right." I said with a weak nod. And she was. I couldn't forget that, no matter what, my top priority right now was to keep Xena, and Xavier, safe. And that meant fitting in. Living a normal, average life. And if that's what it took, then that's what I'd have to do.  
"I promise I'll start looking for work. Properly." I continued sincerely. "And I'll do more around the house. But I'm not letting this go, Katie. I can't."  
"Do what you need to, Matthew." She told me with a smile. "Just… be careful, won't you?"  
"I will." I replied, heaving a deep sigh and a slight chuckle. "You know, it's been a while since anyone's cared so much about my wellbeing. I mean, Xena does, obviously, but… It's nice to actually hear someone say it once in a while." Katie simply smiled, and gently put a hand on my shoulder.

"You saved my life, Matthew." She said, the coffee cup in her hands starting to tremble slightly. "I… I owe you just as much as Xena does. I _care_ about you just as much as Xena does." With this, she moved her hand from my shoulder to place it over one my own. Suddenly, I realised what her words meant. I understood _exactly_ what she was trying to say to me. And I was outraged. How could she even _think_ for one second that I could…  
"I… I'm going to go and make a start on those errands now." I said calmly, removing my hand from under hers and abruptly standing up.  
"Y-Yeah. Yeah, you do that." Katie replied, stuttering as she spoke, her hands trembling even more so than before. "See you later." I didn't reply to this as I walked over to the front door silently. I didn't even turn back to look at her until I heard her call my name as I reached the doorway.  
"Matthew?" She called hesitantly, her voice full of sadness, regret, and probably a whole range of other emotions. I turned around silently to face her.  
"S-Sorry." She mumbled, looking down at the floor as she spoke. I wanted to laugh out loud at this, really I did. As if that word, that single word, could undo what she'd just said. I don't know how long she'd been thinking of this, or how long she'd been wanting to tell me, but a mere 'sorry' wasn't going to make it go away.  
"I'll be back at lunchtime." I said calmly. And with that, I opened the door behind me, and stepped out of the house in silence.


	13. Chapter 13

**THIRTEEN of THIRTY-TWO**

*NOTE – Ladies and gentleman, it is I, TheManFromMudos! That's right, I'm back, and my goodness, it's been a long time. Do you know when the last chapter of Xavier was posted? October. That's right, October. And I can only apologise that it's been so long. But you know, life often gets in the way of your plans, and I just haven't been able to keep writing for quite some time. Thank you for your concerns about my wellbeing during my hiatus, by the way. No, I wasn't dead, and if I was, I'm not anymore. No, I'm alive and well, and it's high time I came back to FanFiction to finish what I've begun. So, here you go. The moment that you have been waiting for, for _four long months_. Matthew is back. Xena is back. Katie is back. So, as always, read on and enjoy. It's 'Xavier'. THANK YOU!*

*FURTHER NOTE – Before you say anything, I am aware of the hilarious irony of the first four words of this chapter, but please do bear in mind that it _is_ supposed to take place immediately after the events of Chapter Twelve. THANK YOU!*

A short while later, I was in the van, driving down the winding country lanes between Slast and Tinsworth. The journey was filled with tension, despite the fact that I was the only one present, as Katie's words continued to ring out in my mind. How could she do this? How could she have even thought for one second about doing this? She knew full well the struggle that I had been through for Xena. The mutiny and desertion on the Archimedes. The massacre caused by our own son aboard the Constantinople, a registered medical space station, and the eventual destruction of said space station. Not to mention the fact that, as a very literal illegal alien, we had basically trafficked her onto the Angelica. The amount of times I had stuck my neck out for Xena, and Katie had the cheek, the nerve, the sheer audacity, to suggest that I should throw that all away, for her. Alright, she didn't explicitly put it like that, but how else was I supposed to take it? What else was I supposed to think? And while it was pretty far-fetched, I couldn't help but keep thinking that it was very convenient she decided to mention this not long after Xena became ill…

The rest of the journey passed pretty smoothly. I tried to push my apprehensions about Katie to the back of my mind. After all, there were far more important things to think about right now. And I wasn't talking about those errands, either. Oh, no. I was thinking about the library. When we first arrived in Tinsworth a few weeks ago, I remember driving past a public library. It was a reasonably sized establishment, and one which I was sure would provide me with my first clue as to who was behind these mysterious disappearances. It was also right next to a huge supermarket, wherein I could complete one of the many delightful 'errands' that Katie had cast upon me. I sighed heavily then, as I began to think about the future. Was this going to be my life from now on? Shopping? Cleaning? In a few years time, the daily school run? I found myself longing to go back to the days before all of this. Just me and my crewmates, sailing off into deep space, without a care in the world. Nathan, Bradley… Cara. Hell, even Ryan and Alan were occasionally agreeable. And Archie… I wonder what his fate was. Had the Archimedes been used in the evacuation of Earth in 2325? Was it still out there now, sailing under a new banner, served by a new crew, who had no idea of the horror that once unfolded there? Or had it been left for dead, abandoned in the shipyards, gathering rust, until it finally fried along with the rest of the planet and its' unfortunate remaining inhabitants?

Funnily enough, these thoughts did little to elevate my mood, and by the time I finally reached the outskirts of Tinsworth, I was feeling pretty down. But could you blame me? For me, this felt like retirement. All the excitement and action I'd been through, only to end it by spending the rest of my days driving a beaten-up van between my house and the supermarket. What a life… Anyway, it took just a few more minutes after this to reach the town centre, and soon enough, I was pulling the van into a parking space in a huge supermarket car park. I stepped out, slamming the door shut behind me (fortunately, we'd got a replacement key since arriving, so I could actually shut the door without locking myself out now), and drearily made my way over to the automatic doors which welcomed me, along with countless other people who appeared equally dissatisfied with life in general, into the building. Now, at this point, I began some serious, pedal to the metal, extreme shopping. Sadly, it was ultimately no more interesting than regular, uneventful, life-draining shopping. For this reason, I won't bother you with the details. After all, you came here to read about aliens, didn't you? About mystery, excitement, and adventure? Well, I'm sorry that my life doesn't interest you. It doesn't particularly thrill me, either, you know. Fortunately, once I'd finally finished the agonising shopping, it was at last time to go to the library, which relatively speaking would be a roller coaster ride for me.

Now, you might think that a worldly gentleman such as myself had been to every library in the system twice, and read hundreds, nay _thousands_ , of books. But sadly, you'd be wrong. In actuality, I was not a frequent library-goer. This was partly due to the fact that I'd spent most of my life in space, aboard various mining or seeding vessels, where, surprisingly, there isn't much call for a library. It was also partly due to the fact that this was the twenty-fourth century, and there weren't really any libraries to go _to_ , as almost nobody actually read physical books these days. Not when you could download the entire works of Shakespeare in a single instant on any mobile device. But therein lay the problem. Because, you see, I was not _in_ possession of any mobile device. I didn't own a phone. I didn't have a tablet. I'd never had an e-watch, glasses, earpiece, bracelet, necklace, headband, ring, or any of the other ridiculous 'smart' devices that you could purchase these days. I didn't see the appeal, to be honest. Home computers have always been the way to go, if you ask me. Sadly, I didn't own one of those, either. And so, in my desperate, tech-less quest for information, the library would have to do.

As I approached the entrance to the library, I took a moment to stand back and admire it. It was a tremendous piece of architecture, to be sure. Beautiful white stone walls, towering marble pillars, vast arched windows. Sometimes it was easy to forget that all of these grand buildings, all of this brilliant architecture and, indeed, the entirety of this country, was contained within the walls of an enormous space ship. I gazed up at the sky as I walked slowly towards the huge oak doors at the front of the building, squinting to try and make out the faint outline of the ceiling, some twelve miles above my head. Alas, I couldn't see it, my vision obscured by the blinding artificial sunlight which rained down from above, seemingly coming from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. I simply sighed, in awe of it all. Then, I looked down again, just in time to avoid walking straight into a marble pillar to the left of the double doors which lead into the library reception. Stepping around the thick slab of stone, I walked towards one of the doors and pushed it open, before crossing the threshold into the enormous building. And do you know what met my eyes as soon as I walked in? Books. Lots and lots of books.

I stood there for a moment, mouth agape as I stared, bewildered, into the vast expanse of the library. The walls around me were completely obscured by shelf after shelf, stacked to the ceiling with books both old and new. There must have been several hundreds of thousands in this very room, and this was just the main gallery. If this was a small, local library, then I could only begin to imagine the sheer size of one in the centre of Ike. Light beamed into the room through a huge ceiling of ornately decorated glass panes, as well as the odd window occasionally peering from between the densely packed shelves. Down on the floor of the huge room, tables and chairs were dotted around, many of which were already occupied by the well-versed, well-educated, or just plain curious citizens of the town. A few doors jutted out from between the shelves near the back of the room, which presumably lead to other sections of the library. But before any of that, barely a dozen yards from the grand entrance doorway, was a desk. A long, windowed desk, behind which sat a middle-aged gentleman, who I assumed was a librarian. I approached the desk silently, hoping to ask of him some assistance.

"Good morning, sir." The man said warmly, looking up from his book as I approached. "How can we help you today?"  
"Well, I…" I began, but hesitated as I realised that I wasn't actually sure what I was looking for. I'd come all this way without even thinking about where I was going to start. Should I research similar cases from the past? Should I try to find out more about the ship itself? Neither of these would actually help me to find out _who_ was behind all of this. Then I thought back to what Anne, the little old woman in the shop, had told me yesterday. She said that her friend's grandson had seen his father being dragged away in the middle of the night by men in blue hazard suits. _That_ was my starting point. I had to find out who those people worked for. And I knew just how to do it.  
"Yes, could you direct me to your technology section, please?" I asked hurriedly.  
"Of course, sir." The man replied kindly. "Section Six, through the left door at the end of the main gallery. Shelves 0 to 39 for Technological History, 40 to 79 for Technology in Practice, 80-119 for Innovators in Technology, 120 t-"  
"That's what I'm looking for." I interrupted, eager to avoid listening to every single category within the section. "Thanks very much".

"Not at all, sir." The man smiled. "Feel free to stay in the library to read, or take books out if you so wish. Just ensure that you check them out at the front desk before you leave." I thanked him again for his help, and then walked away, moving further into the sea of literature which surrounded me. 'Section Six', I said to myself quietly as I walked towards the door in the upper left corner of the huge room. Sure enough, above the huge slab of ornate wood was a plaque which read 'Section Six – Technology'. I pushed the heavy door aside and stepped through the wide entryway into a room much smaller than the main gallery, albeit significantly large in itself. The design of the room was almost identical to that of the main gallery, although there was no glass in the ceiling, and far fewer tables and chairs. I walked silently across the room, reading the numbers of each shelf as I passed. The term 'shelf' was something of a misnomer, though, as each one was actually an entire stack of shelves, numbered 000.1, 000.2, 000.3, and so on. Soon, I reached Shelf 80, behind which were Shelves 81-89, and after which the numbers continued to climb. I looked up in awe at the tall bookcase before me, which must have contained a few hundred books by itself. Quite where I was going to begin, I was unsure.

Stepping around the bookcase, I wandered over to the one behind it, numbered 'Shelf 81'. Again, several hundred books filled each shelf, and none of them particularly stood out. That is, except, for one. As I looked up at the towering set of bookshelves, I noticed one particular book was at least three inches thick, and jutted out from the others on the shelf considerably. I reached out to pull the huge encyclopaedia away from its less impressive counterparts, and read the words imprinted in gold leaf along its spine. _The Companies of Tomorrow_. The front cover read the same, along with a banner which said ' _A Comprehensive Guide to the Largest Names in Technology_ '. The cover also bore the logos of no less than six interplanetary tech giants, namely Kovacs, Weyland-Yutani, the JMC, the MTA, Ashbridge Industries and N.X. Tulmorian. These were commonly referred to as the 'Big Six', and between them, they pretty much ran everything, everywhere. The book was clearly outdated, however, as I'd heard that Weyland-Yutani was practically non-existent after the trillion-dollar lawsuits which ensued after the Earth disaster. In this situation, however, the book seemed a perfect start.

I opened the book and flicked back several dozen pages, stopping at page 162. 'Montreal Technical Association', the title read, along with the sub-heading: 'Canadian Healthcare for the Entire Galaxy'. Below this, there was a brief description of the history of the MTA, and a small index which listed the company's various divisions and departments. I flicked further in, and landed on a page entitled: 'Neolith Xerxes Tulmorian – Russian Steel, Russian Tech, Russian Engineering'. Again, this page seemed to be the first of a separate section of the book, solely dedicated to NX Tulmorian. One last time, I flicked deeper still, and soon found a page which bore the words: 'The Weyland-Yutani Corporation – Anglo-Japanese Titan of Aerospace Engineering'. I had to chuckle at just how incorrect this phrase now was. Weyland-Yutani was once a household name. Everybody knew someone who worked for them. And now… well, let's just say that the illustrious founder of Weyland Industries probably never imagined that his company would one day be so despised. Or maybe he did, who are we to know? Regardless, this entire section of the book was now effectively obsolete. But that didn't mean that it wasn't useful…

After a few long moments of silence, I slowly closed the book, and carefully read its front cover once again. I sighed heavily, wondering if I really was getting myself in too deep. I mean, really. If one of these companies was actually behind this, who was _I_ to bring them down? Me, one man, against a trillion-dollar interplanetary conglomerate? I couldn't keep Xena safe from one crazed ex-employee with a grudge to bear, let alone take on one of the biggest names in human history. And now I had Xavier to worry about, not to mention Katie and Amanda. What if this led me down a path I didn't want to tread? What if they were hurt, or taken? What if I was killed, and I couldn't protect them? I tried to push these thoughts from my mind, but I simply couldn't. I stared blankly into the golden lettering along the spine of the book, and thought for a moment about whether I was doing the right thing. After several long moments, I reached a decision. I turned away from the huge case of books before me, and I walked back out into the main gallery. The decision I made that day would have consequences, let me tell you. But I made it, and that was that. I left the library a few minutes later. And I took that book with me.


	14. Chapter 14

**FOURTEEN of THIRTY-TWO**

*NOTE – Hello everybody, it's me, TheManFromMudos, and today I'm back again, as promised, with another chapter of 'Xavier'. Now, we may have gotten through thirteen chapters of this story already, but trust me, this one and the next are the ones that will _really_ set the major plotlines of the story in motion. You may have noticed hints of these plotlines from Chapter 7 and onwards, but if not, feel free to go back and check them out before giving this one a read, if you have time. I would also like to point out that this was originally going to be the longest chapter of the story so far, coming in at well over 3,000 words. I initially felt that everything that I wanted to go into at this point _should_ take place within a single chapter, and I still maintain that the effect of this chapter may have been more powerful that way. But alas, it was simply too much to take in all at once. So, I've decided to move the last few hundred words of this chapter to the beginning of the next one, which will be coming in a few days, by the way. Anyway, that's all I wanted to say for now. I'll leave you now to sink your teeth into this one, and please, don't hesitate to let me know what you think. So, as always, read on and enjoy. It's 'Xavier'. THANK YOU!*

'Though the Jupiter Mining Corporation is part of a specialised industry…' I read drearily, my eyes aching as the words began to blur before me. I was sure I'd read this sentence already. Three times, as a matter of fact. Or maybe I was just getting tired. Since bringing this book home from the library, I'd done nothing but read. I got up in the morning, I had breakfast and a cup of tea, then I sat down to read. At lunch and dinner, I stopped to eat, then sat back down to read. And finally, at bedtime, I went to sleep, only to get up again in the morning and read. I'd been doing this for three, maybe four days now, and I was getting nowhere. Things weren't exactly going well around the house, either. Katie and I continued to avoid conversation, and Xena still coughed, worse every day. And all I could think to do was read. To sit here, locked away in the spare bedroom, reading the same lines over and over, ignoring my problems like any rational person would.

It was about an hour or so later, at around four o'clock, that I heard a knock at the door. I tried to say 'come in', but barely mumbled, too tired to even attempt speaking at this point. The latch clicked and in walked Katie, holding a brimming mug of tea in her hand.  
"Brought you a drink." She said kindly, walking over to the desk I sat behind and placing the mug down, taking care not to spill any tea.  
"Thanks." I groaned, stretching with genuine effort just to reach the mug. Leaning forwards with a pained moan, I sipped carefully at the drink.  
"So," Katie said with a discernible tone of concern in her voice, "How's it going?"  
"Horribly." I admitted with a sigh, leaning back in my chair and staring at the ceiling. "I think this book was in the wrong section."  
"What do you mean?" She asked, an eyebrow raised, although I suspected that she didn't really care.  
"Well, most of it's about uniforms." I explained, flicking through the book as I spoke. "Colours and materials. Listen to this: 'Ashbridge Industries International – Seeding and Colonisation Division: Black nylon dress shirt. Black cotton trousers. White aramid belt. White woollen socks.' I _know_ this uniform Katie, I _wore_ it for years."

"So why don't you just take the book back?" She sighed, her tone still one of concern, although with slight agitation.  
"Because this could be it, Katie." I replied, staring deep into the page before me. "It might seem useless, but this book could be the answer."  
"How?" She asked, trying her best to remain calm and supportive. I, however, could not contain myself so easily in my current state of fatigue.  
"I don't fucking know how!" I snapped, slamming the book shut and dropping it onto the desk with a thud. I leaned forwards, burying my head in my hands as Katie simply looked at me with bewilderment. I sighed heavily, and took a few deep breaths to steel myself.  
"Sorry." I muttered, without lifting my head. I didn't want to look at her after this outburst. "I'm just tired. I'm so tired, Katie."  
"Look, why don't you take a break?" She replied gently, placing a hand on my shoulder. "You've been at it for days, Matthew, you've barely left this room."  
"I know." I said hoarsely, lowering my hands and staring into space. "I know. But I need to figure this out."  
"So take your time with it." She replied, continuing to attempt a supportive tone. "Have a rest, get some sleep. Come back to it fresh in the morning."

"Have a rest?" I whispered slowly, although my tone and pace quickly started to rise as I became angry once again. "Every night, a dozen more people disappear. Do you have any idea what could be happening to them, right at this very moment? Do you?"  
"Matthew, please stop." Katie said solemnly, her voice beginning to tremble. "You're becoming obsessed. You've hardly spoken to me in days. Or Xena, for that matter." I simply slumped back in my chair and closed my eyes, breathing heavily as I calmed myself a second time.  
"Is something troubling you?" Katie continued, crouching beside my chair and placing a hand over my own. Ordinarily, I would take this as an advance, but under the circumstances I could see that she was simply trying to comfort me.  
"I'm fine." I muttered, although she clearly knew that this was a lie. She gazed at me with a motherly smile, and reluctantly, I continued.  
"It's just…" I started, my voice shaky. "Let's say, for a moment… let's just imagine… that one day… Xena might not be here."  
"What do you mean?" She asked, startled by the implications of this statement. "Is something happening between you?"

"No, it's nothing like that." I replied, shaking my head weakly. "Have you actually seen her lately, Katie? Have you spoken to her at all?"  
"Well, she doesn't really _speak_ , as such, does she?" Katie remarked jokingly. Ordinarily, I would have chuckled. But not right now.  
"I'm serious, Katie." I told her with a sigh, my voice almost deadpan. "She's not well. You must have noticed."  
"What, because she's coughing a bit?" She replied naïvely, trying to refute the possibility of anything worse. "Matthew, it's just a bug."  
"A bug?" I chuckled, shaking my head and sighing for the hundredth time. "She's a Xenomorph, Katie, she doesn't get bugs."  
"Then what do you think it is?" She asked. What _did_ I think it was? Honestly, I hadn't the faintest idea. All I knew was that it wasn't right. Whatever was wrong with Xena, it wasn't normal, and it wasn't supposed to be happening. I'd never heard her cough before now. Not once.  
"I don't know." I told her truthfully, my voice remaining almost silent throughout. "But how am I supposed to find out? We can't take her to the hospital, we can't call a doctor. She clearly feels like shit and I'm expected to just sit here and fucking watch as she gets worse, Katie." 

"Matthew, I still don't understand." Katie told me with a shake of her head. She took a step back, folding her arms the way a teacher does when she wants her class to shut up. "If she's sick, then why aren't you spending time with her? Why are you cooped up in here reading when she needs you?"  
"Because she's not the only one who needs me, Katie." I said solemnly, staring down at the ground as I spoke. "You need me. Xavier needs me. Amanda needs me. Yes, Xena is so… _so_ important to me. But so are all of you. And I have to do this to keep you all safe."  
"But you _don't_ , Matthew, can't you see that?" She replied caringly. "You don't have to go out there and put yourself in danger to protect us."  
"So what happens when I wake up one morning and you're gone?" I said bluntly. "What happens when our children are taken from us in the middle of the night? What happens then, Katie?!" I gazed at her sombrely for several moments, waiting for some reply. But none came. She simply stood there, looking down at her feet, refusing to even acknowledge the question. Refusing to accept the lingering threat staring us all right in the face. 

"Exactly." I continued, my voice trembling considerably at this point. I saw tears begin to well in Katie's eyes. "And when Xena's gone-"  
"Don't say that." She interrupted, her voice breaking up. She shook her head in denial, though she knew the truth. "Matthew, please don't say that."  
"When Xena's gone…" I repeated, collecting myself as I fought to hold back my own tears, "That child's mother is gone. And then it's up to me. I have to raise him myself. How can I do that, if he could be taken at any moment? How do I look after him when that risk is always there, every day, for the rest of our lives? I need to stop this for _him_ , Katie. Not for me, not to prove myself to anyone. For him, and Amanda, and you." The room fell silent then, for several moments. Neither one of us was quite sure how to continue the conversation after that. Katie simply stared at me with sadness in her eyes, knowing in her heart of hearts that what I was saying was the truth. Xavier was my priority now. He had to be.  
"Dinner's ready in half an hour." She finally said, her voice barely more than a whisper as she turned to leave. "I'll call you down when it's done." 

"Oh, and by the way…" She continued, turning back around as she reached the door. "That missing android that was on the news the other day…"  
"The KT unit?" I asked, sighing as I picked my book up from the table and leaned back in my chair once again. "What about it?"  
"Well, I was just thinking, you know." Katie explained, shrugging her shoulders. "Maybe it has something to do with all of this?"  
"I doubt it." I told her with a shake of my head. "A single android couldn't be behind this. Besides, Mavis' grandson saw more than one man."  
"Who's Mavis?" She asked, a look of confusion on her face. Of course, I hadn't told her the full, unabridged version of the story Anne told me.  
"Doesn't matter." I said, brushing away my previous remark. "Anyway, I don't see how there could be a connection."  
"Well don't you think it's worth looking in to?" Katie continued adamantly. "You've got the book right in front of you. Look it up."  
"Katie, this is a book of uniforms." I said, holding up the book to show her one of the pages. "Not androids. What can I possibly find in here?"  
"Well, you could look for the company that makes the KT series, for a start." She remarked bluntly, unimpressed by my current attitude.

"Fine. If you really think it'll lead somewhere." I said with a sigh. Of course, I knew that the 'K' in 'KT' was short for 'Kovacs'. KES named all of their androids this way. So, I flicked back in the book to find the contents page, and ran my finger down the list for Kovacs Extrasolar Solutions.  
"Right, here we are, then." I said, turning to the corresponding index page.. "Oh, and would you believe it? No mention of any androids."  
"At least read the page first!" Katie snapped. I could tell by the tone of her voice that she really was certain she had a lead, here.  
"Alright, I'm reading it." I assured her, studying the page carefully. "Now then: Aerospace Technologies, Light-Speed Research, Electrical Engineering, Bio-Warfare, Long Range Communications, Gravi- hold on." I hesitated suddenly, the words only just registering in my head.  
"What is it?" Katie asked, now approaching my desk once again, apparently becoming eager that her little hunch may actually get us somewhere.  
"Bio-Warfare." I repeated, looking back up the list to triple-check that I had read the words correctly. "That's biological weapons, surely?"  
"Well, check it out!" She said enthusiastically. This was a very different Katie to the one who had condemned my obsessive behaviour mere moments ago, but I wasn't complaining. Finally, she seemed to be as invested in this as I was. And believe you me, I was pretty invested.

"I will, I will…" I assured her calmly. "Okay, Page 934… 931, 932, 933, ah! Page nine-hundred and thirty-four: 'Department of Biological Warfare'."  
"Anything?" Katie asked the very instant that I'd finished my sentence. I'd barely even glanced at the page, and she was demanding a response.  
"Just give me a second!" I told her with some annoyance. "Alright, we've got Security, Research, Testing, Development, Distribution…"  
"And what about the uniforms; look at the uniforms!" She insisted sharply, her tone becoming more urgent still.  
"Yes, ma'am." I replied through gritted teeth, becoming slightly overwhelmed by her urgency now. "Dark blue cotton, turquoise nylon, white silk, red polyester…" My voice trailed off as I reached the fifth item on the list. I glared at it in disbelief for several moments. Could it be?  
"What? What is it, Matthew?" Katie demanded, leaning over my shoulder to try and get a glimpse at the page I was reading.  
"Flash-Spun High Density Polyethylene, Full Body, Blue" I whispered, astonished. "Or in other words, a blue hazmat suit." I looked up at Katie in disbelief, only to see her shrugging her shoulders, seemingly ignorant to the fact that she'd just hit the nail square on the head.

"Katie," I explained, "this is _exactly_ the uniform that the kidnappers wore." I was still in a state of utter disbelief myself, but Katie's face fell at this.  
"Seriously?" She said hesitantly. Even she could barely believe the breakthrough she had just made. "I was _right_?"  
"Yes!" I shouted cheerfully. "Yes, Katie, you were right!" I practically leaped out of my chair in excitement, tossing the enormous book aside and throwing my arms around her. Four days I'd been at it. _Four days_ , but at last I had my first real lead. At last, I was getting somewhere.  
"Oh, thank you so much!" I exclaimed, embracing Katie tightly. She returned the gesture, and for several moments we simply stood there in one another's arms. Soon, though, the excitement began to wear off, and I came to terms with what I was doing. A spur of the moment thing, but now was the time to end it. I tried to pull away, but Katie would not release her grasp. I cleared my throat purposefully to remind her of our current situation, but suddenly found myself drowned out by a much louder, and much more purposeful cough. A cold shiver ran down my spine at the realisation that we were not alone. The two of us fell silent, and I slowly turned my head towards the doorway. Needless to say, the embrace came to a swift end when I saw Xena standing there.


	15. Chapter 15

**FIFTEEN of THIRTY-TWO**

*NOTE – Hello everybody, it's TheManFromMudos here. Now, I know what you're all thinking. 'Man, how _dare_ you leave us on a juicy cliffhanger like that for _six whole months_! Where the hell have you been?' And I guess I do owe you a decent explanation. You see, over the last six months, I've done quite a lot of thinking, particularly about this very story. About the whole Xena trilogy, as a matter of fact. And the truth is, for quite a long time, I didn't know if I could carry on writing it. I didn't know if I was really interested in the unusual subject matter of an Alien-themed sci-fi romance novella anymore. Then I spent a long time looking at the bigger picture, thinking about how far we've come with Matthew and Xena, unsure if I really wanted to finish their tale. It was a difficult decision, but after much deliberation, I came to this conclusion: Yes. Yes, I do want to finish Matthew and Xena's journey. Before I 'close the book' on these characters, so to speak, I must first finish writing it. They deserve to get their ending, as do you, the reader. So let's do it! Let's finish the story, starting today. Please read on, and as always, enjoy. It's 'Xavier'. THANK YOU!*

For several moments, no-one spoke a word. I gazed, dumbfounded, at Xena, who glared coldly at Katie, who in turn glanced guiltily at me. I tried to think of something, anything, to say, though in these situations, there was seldom anything one _could_ say which wouldn't simply make things worse. Nevertheless, I would try. If only to break the long and suffocating silence that engulfed us all at that very moment, I would try to say _something.  
_ "Xena…" I said hesitantly, my voice barely more than a whisper. She looked away in disgust, refusing to even acknowledge that I was speaking. I looked at Katie, who appeared as though she was about to speak herself. I simply shook my head, knowing full well that it was a very bad idea for her to even attempt to talk to Xena at this moment in time. For a few more moments, she stood silently in the doorway, unsure of how to react. Then, finally, she looked at me. Just for a second, and with an expression of utter disappointment. And with that, she walked away.

"Xena, wait." I tried again, heading towards the door to follow her out of the room.  
"Matthew?" I heard Katie whisper with regret. "I'm sorry." I chose to ignore this remark, and kept on walking until I was out into the hallway.  
"Do you want me to help?" She continued. I stopped dead in my tracks. I wanted to shout at her right now, I really did. As if Xena hadn't already had her suspicions about the two of us, she'd just walked in at the worst possible moment and taken what she saw completely out of context. Did Katie honestly think that being by my side as I explained to Xena that there was _nothing_ going on between the two of us was a particularly bright idea?  
"I think you've helped enough." I said calmly, though my voice was laced with anger. I refused to even turn to look at her as I spoke, and instead walked silently away. This was not the time to argue with her, and I knew that perfectly well. Xena was owed an explanation. Not from Katie, but from me. I had to tell her with my own lips exactly what was going on between me and Katie: nothing. And I had to make her believe it.

I soon found Xena in our bedroom, gazing silently out of the window, though what she was gazing _at_ was beyond me. It was strange, the way she behaved. Like she could see perfectly. I suppose she could, in a way, but not the way we do. All those colours and shapes, the rolling fields and mighty hills. I could see them, and if you were there, you could have seen them. But what did she see? What had she seen when she walked in on me and Katie just a few minutes ago? To walk into a room and know that something was wrong, without even seeing it. How did that feel?  
"Xena?" I mumbled, coyly stepping into the room and closing the door behind me. She simply sighed, refusing to even acknowledge my presence. I stepped further into the room, sitting down on the bed near where she stood. I shuffled my feet nervously, trying to think of something to say.  
"Nice view, isn't it?" I said quietly, almost immediately hating myself for it. I might as well have asked her about the weather. She sighed again, this time shaking her slowly. I knew I was just dancing around the issue. It was difficult to know where to begin. But I had to try. And I would.

"Xena, please." I continued, my voice sincere, but shaky. "You have to listen to me." But she didn't. She didn't have to listen, and she didn't want to.  
"Look, what you saw in there… well, what happened," I told her calmly, "It wasn't what you think." She glanced back at me with disdain, and had every right to, in all honesty. I just wanted her to listen. I wanted her to understand that I hadn't betrayed her trust, that it was a misunderstanding.  
"Katie and I…" I said hesitantly, not knowing how to word any of it. "We were… well, yes, we were hugging." She let out a low growl at this.  
"Xena…" I tried again. This time, she turned to face me and screeched. She was too angry right now to listen to reason, but I had to keep trying.  
"Alright, I'm sorry!" I exclaimed, my voice beginning to tremble. "But Xena, please will you listen?" She stared down at the floor for a moment, as if finally considering my plea. Then, she drew the curtain and came over to the bed, where she sat down beside me in silence. She still refused to look at me, but at least we were making _some_ progress. Now, I had to explain to her that she had completely the wrong idea about me and Katie.

"You know you still mean just as much to me now as you did when we first met?" I said warmly, placing a hand over her own. She almost smiled, but found that under the circumstances, she simply could not. But I wanted her to understand how sincere I was. She really was everything to me. She had been from the start. In this moment, I didn't care about anything else. Just being with her made all of life's problems seem… insignificant.  
"I promise you that there is absolutely _nothing_ going on between me and Katie." I assured her with a truthful gaze. She sighed again, that being one of only a handful of vocalisations she was capable of, and returned a faint but telling smile. I knew then that she finally believed me.  
"I love _you_ , Xena." I whispered with a smile, squeezing her hand tightly. "Not her. You know that, don't you?" She nodded slowly, and though she still appeared quite distraught, it seemed as though she was now beginning to brighten up.

"Come here." I said softly, putting my arm around her shoulder and pulling her towards me in a gentle embrace. She returned the gesture, running her slender fingers across my back as she did so. I would have done the same, but considering she had those… whatever they were all over her back, I opted instead to find a relatively smooth spot and give it a whole-hearted pat. Xena breathed softly, content with the exchange and, presumably, my apology. After a few seconds though, this breathing stopped, and she began to cough yet again. It was at this point that I began to worry.  
"Are you alright?" I asked, pulling away from her. She nodded, but was still coughing. This time, though, it was different. It was a heavier, more hacking cough. For several moments, it continued, with her wheezing slightly to catch her breath between each cough.

"Xena?" I said worriedly, putting my hand on her back once again, this time to administer more of a strike than a pat. The coughing continued, louder and louder by the second as she rested her head on my shoulder, so I continued to strike her, trying not to show her just how afraid I was right now. Afraid of what it could be that was doing this to her, that was making her so clearly unwell. Suddenly, she gagged loudly, and I heard the sound of something splattering against the curtains. I turned my head almost immediately, and what I saw made my stomach churn. A huge hole was burning itself into the curtains, surrounded by a bright yellow substance, which was dripping onto the carpet with a distinctive sizzle.  
"Jesus Christ!" I yelled in a panic, turning back to Xena as she prepared to do the same again. "Katie! Katie, I need help! It's okay, Xena. It's alright." She began to convulse uncontrollably, and suddenly threw up more of the yellow liquid, which this time fell straight to the floor, burning into the carpet beneath our feet. I myself was shaking violently at this point, clueless and utterly terrified at what was happening.

"What's going on?" Katie shouted with concern, running into the room as Xena continued to cough sporadically.  
"Just help me get her onto the bed!" I replied, desperately trying to lay her down. "Don't worry, Xena, it's all going to be fine. You'll be fine, alright?" Katie rushed over and helped me to get her under control. Her coughing was beginning to subside now, but she continued to twist and turn involuntarily. I fought desperately to remain calm as I watched her writhing in pain before me, but even so I found tears beginning to stream down my face. Katie was more confused than anything else, though she too appeared quite worried as she tried to restrain Xena on the bed. After several long and painful moments, she finally stopped convulsing. Her coughing had also stopped, and now she breathed heavily. I tried to talk to her, but she did not respond, so I could only conclude that she had passed out. I looked at Katie with tears in my eyes, and she looked back at me in shock. I'd had my doubts about that cough from the start, but I couldn't have possibly imagined that things would get so far out of hand.

Several minutes passed in absolute silence before either of us could bring ourselves to talk again. I was too distressed by what had just happened to start up a conversation, and Katie appeared reluctant to speak for fear of saying the wrong thing. I stared blankly at Xena, now sprawled across the bed unconscious. At least when she was like this she wasn't coughing her guts up, quite literally. I could still hardly believe that things had gotten this bad and I hadn't even had the decency to notice. I glanced over at the curtains, now singed black around the edges of the gaping hole which had been burned into them. I noticed that Katie was doing the same, albeit with a somewhat more confused expression on her face than I had.  
"It's blood." I told her, my voice broken and hoarse. "At least, I think it is. Nathan told me- Sorry, the Science and Medical Officer aboard the Archimedes told me… well, he told me that Xenomorph blood was highly corrosive. Xena isn't… she's not a 'pure' specimen, so her blood should be considerably diluted, but most likely still strong enough to melt through fabrics, like the curtain. And the carpet."

"So she was coughing up blood?" Katie asked hesitantly. I simply buried my head in my hands. It did appear that way, didn't it? This was no bug, that was for sure. I'd yet to find a bug whose symptoms included vomiting blood. But if it wasn't a bug, then what was it? What could it possibly be?  
"Are you alright?" She continued gently, though this was merely out of sympathy as she must've been able to tell that I clearly wasn't.  
"Not really." I told her truthfully, wiping a solitary tear from my left eye. "It's just that… I knew something was wrong with her, Katie. I _knew_ she was ill, and I did nothing about it. And the worst part is, I don't even know _why_ this is happening to her." I stared emptily into Katie's eyes, breathing slowly and deeply. Then, I stared back at Xena, dumbfounded. If only I'd seen this coming, I'd… Well, I'd've at least spent more _time_ with her. I'd've held her in my arms, embraced her, kissed her, showed her so much more affection than I had these last few days and weeks. Right now, I could only hope that whatever she was going through, she would recover for long enough that I could show her just how much she meant to me.

"Katie?" I whispered, my eyes still fixated on Xena. "I think…" But I simply could not bring myself to end that sentence. I bit my lip, almost ready to cry again, though I steeled myself with a few long, deep breaths. Katie leaned across the bed, reaching out to take my hand comfortingly.  
"What do you think?" She said quietly. "What is it?" I turned to her and smiled weakly, almost chuckling to myself as I thought again about how utterly _stupid_ I'd been. I felt ashamed that I'd put Xena through this, and also selfish because I didn't deserve to feel ashamed when she was in the position that she was. And yet, here we were. The clueless navigator and his ailing partner. With one solid, viable, and downright horrific conclusion.

"I think she's dying, Katie." I muttered, staring at her with tears in my eyes. And with that inevitable word out in the open, I could contain myself no longer. I took one sharp intake of breath, slumped back in my chair and closed my eyes tightly. And then, and only then, did I allow the tears to pour.


	16. Chapter 16

**SIXTEEN of THIRTY-TWO**

*NOTE - Hi everybody, TheManFromMudos here. You'll notice that I've updated this chapter at the same time as uploading the next one. This is simply because this chapter is very short, and the next one is very long. So, to balance it out, I've stuck a little bit of the next chapter onto the end of this one. That's all. Read on and enjoy. It's 'Xavier'. THANK YOU!*

The next morning, I arose as usual and went straight downstairs. My mind was as far from yesterday's events as I could possibly distance it. Yet my own words still rang in my head. 'I think she's dying', I'd said. The very words still troubled me now, though it felt like months since I had said them. But I was trying not to think about that right now. In my mind, if I just ignored it… I could pretend it wasn't really happening. And I knew just the way to distract myself. So, as I reached the foot of the stairs, I took a deep breath, and plastered a smile across my face. I knew Katie was down there, and I didn't want her to worry about me. Sure enough, when I stepped out into the living room, there she sat on the sofa, quietly nursing Amanda in her arms.

"Ah, morning, Katie!" I exclaimed with feigned enthusiasm. "Beautiful day, isn't it? Sun's shining, birds are singing. Pity we don't have a few song thrushes on board, but still... Fed the kids this morning? Course you have, there's Amanda. How-"  
"Are you feeling alright, Matthew?" She interrupted. There was a concerned look in her eye, so I suspected that this question was rhetorical.  
"Couldn't be better!" I lied, continuing to beam artificially as I made my way towards the front door. "In fact, I'm off out for a while. Don't wait up for me, will you?"  
"Matthew, wait." Katie said sincerely. "Don't you want to talk about what happened last night?" She gazed at me caringly, knowing full well that I was putting all this on to hide how I was really feeling. But I was still refusing to cave.  
"Talk?" I said, still smiling, though my voice began to break slightly as I did so. "Why, what's there to talk about?

"Matthew, stop it." Katie replied in a slightly angered tone. "You know perfectly well what I mean. Xena is sick, very sick, and instead of sitting by her bedside, you're gallivanting off to… where are you gallivanting off to, anyway?"  
"Server banks." I said hesitantly, even now refusing to acknowledge the elephant in the room. "There's a huge digital library in the city. Could find something very interesting…" Once again, I smiled, though it was becoming weaker now.  
"Well, I think you ought to spend the day with Xena." Katie told me sternly with a demanding look in her eye. "You need to stop worrying about other people's problems and start worrying about your own for once."

"Katie, more and more people disappear aboard this ship _every_ single day." I replied, dodging the topic again. "Someone's got to get to the bottom of it, and I'm determined to ensure that said someone is me." With that, I turned to the door again and pulled it open. Stepping into the porch, I grabbed a jacket and pulled it's long, blue sleeves over my arms. As I stepped towards the front door and pushed my key into the lock to open it, Katie chimed in again.  
"Why are you doing this, Matthew?" She said with clear frustration. "Seriously, why?" I sighed heavily and shook my head.  
"I don't know what you're talking about." I said adamantly, without even turning back to look at her as I turned the key.  
"Yes, you do." She replied. "Your girlfriend is at death's door. And from what I can see, you don't seem to give a shit." I stopped immediately. My fake smile came crashing down as the words registered in my head. I pressed my forehead against the door and closed my eyes, falling silent. Several moments passed before I could bring myself to respond.

"How dare you?" I eventually brought myself to say, my smile now gone and my voice barely more than a whisper.  
"Matthew, I'm sorry." Katie replied apologetically, her voice filled with pained regret. "I-"  
"No, _how dare you_?" I said again, my voice much louder, almost a shout now. "How _dare_ you tell me how to feel about all this?" I stormed back into the living room and walked right up to where Katie still sat.

"You have _no idea_ what I'm going through right now, Katie." I told her, leaning in close to her face as I spoke. " _No idea_." I stepped back, slumping into an armchair and breathing heavily. I buried my head in my hands, fighting back tears as I did so.

"I… I can't cope." I said shakily, my eyes watering as I steeled myself. "Okay? I just can't. And until I can, I need to forget about it. I need to distract myself from it. Do you understand?"  
"Yes, Matthew, I understand." Katie assured me, reaching out to place a hand on my knee. "But this isn't healthy. The way you're acting, it's… it's not right." I knew that there was truth in her words, of course. But I couldn't help it. I wasn't strong enough to deal with this. With any of this, for that matter. My life was out in deep space. On a cargo tug, or a seeding ship, billions of miles from the troubles of the everyday. I couldn't live a normal life, with normal problems, let alone this…

"I need to do this, Katie." I eventually told her, my voice calming as I wiped a finger under my eyes. "I need to deal with this problem in the only way that I can. And I need you to let me." Katie smiled softly, taking my hand in hers.  
"Okay." She said in a gentle voice. "Go and do what you need to do. But just remember: you can't run from this forever."  
"I know." I assured her, pulling my hand away and slowly getting to my feet. "And I will stop running. When I'm ready." With that, I walked over to the door without an another word. The key still stuck out of the lock. I clasped it between my fingers and finished turning it, and the pulled the door open. I stepped out silently, and closed it behind me with a muffled click.

The drive to Ike took almost an hour to complete. Slast was nothing but a tiny village, right near the front of the ship, but the huge city of Ike was all the way at the back. The lengthy journey gave me plenty of time to reflect, though, which is precisely what I did. I thought about Xena, laid up in bed back home, and about Katie's concerned words. Not for the first time, I'd run away from my responsibilities. I'd pushed my pain to the back of my mind, tried to ignore it, and refused to even acknowledge it when questioned. I knew I couldn't keep doing this. Sooner or later, I'd have to address the situation. I'd have to face the fact that Xena was… And that there was nothing I could do about it. If it really was happening, then nothing I could do would stop it. And worse still, nobody else on this ship would ever know that she had even existed...

'What if it happened right now?' I thought to myself as I drove. What if Xena collapsed again, potentially even died at this exact moment, whilst I was sauntering off to get involved in matters that didn't concern me? I didn't think I could live with that. With the guilt of not even being there as the love of my life slipped away into the darkness. But I could still be there. I could turn around right now and go back to her. The urge to do so grew stronger with each passing mile. At every roundabout, at every junction, I paused to think: Should I turn around, go back to Slast, and be with her? Or should I keep going, find the library, and perhaps find out the truth about this ship? Suffice to say that every time, I chose the latter. Every single time I asked myself that same exact question, and every single time the answer was to just keep driving on.

I reached the outskirts of the city by around nine o'clock. As I'd correctly presumed, the roads were crammed full of traffic. Cars, buses and lorries filled every lane of every street. I wasn't even entirely sure where the library was, though I had a rough idea. And so, for the next half-hour, I tried to find it, seemingly going around in circles as I did so. The city was big and complicated, a maze of one way streets and double roundabouts. Just when I thought I was heading in the right direction, a 'No Entry' sign would pop up out of nowhere and force me to turn down a different road. But finally, after thirty tedious minutes of driving, I found it. A huge, gleaming white building standing out against the brutalist architecture of the surrounding tower blocks, the words 'National Digital Library of Angelica' emblazoned across a banner draped over the entrance. I pulled up as close as I could and clambered out of the van, leaving the door unlocked as I left, of course.

The entryway to the library alone was easily the size of my entire house, whilst the main complex spilled out from behind. The height of a four story building, at least, though likely only a single floor existed inside, this library made the one in Tinsworth look tiny. And that was saying something. Walking inside, I found a vast lobby area, filled with people. There had to be hundreds of visitors, all here for different reasons, all looking for different things. But I was willing to bet that none of them were looking for the same thing that I was looking for. Despite its size, the lobby seemed to be staffed by just one receptionist, who sat at a desk to one side of the enormous chamber with a nonplussed expression on his face. I walked over to him with a smile, but as I approached, it was clear to me that my mood was not going to be reciprocated.

"Excuse me." I said as I approached the desk. "I'm looking for information on Kovacs Extrasolar Solutions. Can you help?"  
"Of course, sir." The man replied with a fake smile and a clearly bored tone. "Just head down that corridor over there, past the Weyland-Yutani data banks, and Kovacs Extrasolar Solutions is on the left." I had stopped listening to his directions mid-sentence, though, focusing on just two words that he'd said about halfway through. Those two ever-present words...  
"Weyland-Yutani?" I repeated with a clear tone of intrigue in my voice. "What sort of stuff do you have on them?"  
"Everything, sir." He remarked, as if I'd just asked the stupidest question in history. "Every single file, email, telephone call and radio transmission that has ever been sent within the Weyland-Yutani Corporation is contained within our data banks."


	17. Chapter 17

**SEVENTEEN of THIRTY-TWO**

*NOTE – Hello, everybody, it's me, TheManFromMudos. You know what they say: two months are better than six. Well, nobody says that. But it is true! I'm improving, and hopefully I can improve even more with the next chapter. But it's about time, I think, that I brought you chapter seventeen, a chapter which I feel is one of the major turning points of the story. I won't give anything away, you'll have to read it for yourself. But before you do, I'd recommend that you revisit the last chapter, as I've extended it significantly. This one was too long, that one was too short, so I balanced it out a little. Once you've read chapter sixteen, come back to this one, and enjoy. It's 'Xavier'. THANK YOU!*

"But that's not possible." I said distantly. "How can you possibly have all of that information? And more to the point, why?"  
"You really don't know?" The man replied, genuinely perplexed. "Where've you been for the last twenty years, then?"  
"Oh, you know." I said, shrugging dismissively. "I've been about. Or not about. Missed quite a lot of it, so tell me more."  
"Well," He explained, sighing heavily before he did so. "When the Weyland-Yutani Corporation was disbanded after the Earth incident - I presume you're familiar with _that_ , at the very least - the Off-World Association ruled that all of their internal communications were to be declassified. It's public domain now, anyone can freely access anything they choose."  
"So you're telling me that you have a record of everything that Weyland-Yutani has _ever_ done?" I asked in disbelief. "But there must be tons of incriminating files in there. Why is nobody doing something? Why aren't they looking into this?" 

"In case you haven't noticed, mate," The man said sarcastically, "Over forty _billion_ people were made stateless less than two decades ago. We're in the middle of the biggest population crisis in history. People have bigger concerns right now."  
"I suppose you're right.' I muttered, though I still found it hard to believe that in all this time, not one single person had made any attempt to bring a case against Weyland-Yutani executives. How could nobody have even considered it?  
"Look, I've no doubt that when all of this settles down," He told me, "Somebody will look into it properly. Someone will eventually bring Weyland-Yutani to justice, properly, for what they've done. But until then, all that information just sits there, waiting to be read. Who knows, maybe you could be the first? We're open all day, so dive in." And with that, he returned his focus to the computer screen beside him, effectively and somewhat rudely ending the conversation.

Stepping away from the desk, I turned around and walked back towards the centre of the lobby area. There were several doors around the perimeter of the room leading into a number of offshooting corridors. The one the man behind the desk had pointed to was on my left. Heading over to it, I pulled open the door and walked along the corridor behind until I found a room which bore the label 'Weyland-Yutani Corporation'. Looking a little further ahead, I could see the door marked 'Kovacs Extrasolar Solutions' not far from where I was standing. I knew that what I was really searching for was behind that door. And yet, I found myself compelled to enter this one. People walked in and out of the other door, yet not one single soul was entering this one. Why was that? What secrets could lie beyond this particular door, the door that nobody used? The things I could find out about Weyland-Yutani, the truths I could uncover... It was too much to resist. Kovacs could wait. I had bigger fish to fry right now. Cautiously, I pushed open the heavy metal door, and gingerly stepped inside.

The room was dimly lit and coated in a thin layer of dust. Nine-track tape drives filled with huge spools of magnetic tape encased in glass lined the walls. In the centre, newer, larger machines surrounded a central console, though nothing in the room appeared to be turned on. It looked as though nobody had been in here for a while, if at all. Perhaps the man behind the desk had been right. Perhaps people were too busy right now to lift the curtain on Weyland-Yutani. Or perhaps they simply didn't want to look, preferring to live in blissful ignorance. Whichever was true, it had kept this room empty for the longest time. But no longer. I was here now, and I was going to get answers. Dusting off a chair in front of the central monitor, I sat down, flinching as I made contact with the cold metal seat. Then, I reached out and flicked the power switch.

The monitor in front of me flickered to life with a low buzz. All around me, the tape drives began to spin, slowly beginning to wind the magnetic tape from one spool to the next. LEDs lit up on the newer drives around the console, and with a few beeps and clicks, the monitor sprang into action, radiating its gentle blue light out into the room. On the screen, the words 'National Digital Library of Angelica - Data Bank 03 - Weyland-Yutani Corporation' appeared, and underneath that, two logos, one belonging to Weyland-Yutani, and the other presumably representing the library itself. A few moments later, the message was gone, and in the centre of the screen appeared a search bar. This was it. The gateway to every file ever sent, ever created, by anyone at Weyland-Yutani. All at my fingertips. But I just couldn't bring myself to type anything.

What could I type in? What could I search for within a database of millions upon millions of files? I just didn't know. There were a few options along the top of the window, though, so I figured that using those might be a good place to start. The first option was labelled 'All'. No prizes for guessing what it did. I clicked on it, and suddenly the screen was flooded with results. Tens of thousands of pages of results. They were listed in date order, and the very first result was dated '2325/04/05'. It was an email, entitled 'Closing Down'. I was intrigued, to say the least. This email was the final email ever sent by an employee of Weyland-Yutani. The very last file generated, out of billions. I had to read it. I had to see what it said. Letting my curiosity take control, I clicked on the link, and the message in full popped up. This was what it said:

 _Hello all,_

 _Well, what can I say? This is it. Today's the day that Weyland-Yutani is officially disbanded. Still, we knew that it was only a matter of time. After what happened on Earth, after all those secrets came out, it was inevitable. As of tomorrow morning, the company no longer exists. And as of this afternoon, we are required by the Off-World Association to disclose ALL files and internal communications that this company has ever generated. Now, in the ongoing chaos of relocating 43 billion refugees, people may be a tad busy to start pressing charges against us. But I can't guarantee that. And I can't promise any one of you immunity from the law. As of tomorrow, every single action that you have taken as an employee of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation becomes your own responsibility. I wish you all the best of luck in evading any criminal charges which may be brought against you. As for those of you who have received official transfer notices, I'm sure that the new company will welcome your arrival. You'll receive a message from me via my new email within the next 24 hours._

 _Letton_

So that was how it all ended, was it? One swift and wholly insincere apology. 'Thanks for working for us, you're all criminals now'. That was very Weyland-Yutani, I had to admit. One thing that did stand out, though, was this mention of a 'new company'. Could this mean that Weyland-Yutani continued to operate, even to this day, under a new name? Were they perhaps continuing their work away from the public eye? I was compelled to dig deeper, but something else came to my mind. I reached out to the keyboard in front of me and typed in the letters 'J-O-N-E-S'. Big mistake. Thousands of completely irrelevant results filled the screen. It was just too common a name. I had to search for something more specific. 'Archimedes', maybe? 'Andromeda'? Or how about… 'Constantinople'? I pulled the keyboard closer once again, keying in the letters: 'C-O-N-S-T-A-N-T-I-N-O-P-L-E'. The results came in. This time, I scrolled down a little further, until I found another email, this one dated '2319/09/16". It was entitled 'Constantinople Survivor'. Very interesting... Here's what it said:

 _Dunlow,_

 _No doubt you've heard about the Constantinople… Tragic, I know. But there's more to it than meets the eye._ _ **He**_ _was there, Dunlow. With at least two specimens, perhaps more. He got away on a cruiseliner, and the same one that escaped last time went with him. This is the second time that he's fucked up our plans, and I will_ _ **not**_ _let it happen a third. The ship's gone quiet, but it has to turn up eventually. When it does, I want him tracking down. Send out an android, one from Company B so that he can't trace it back to us. Or use a mercenary, I don't care. Just find the bastard and bring him in._

 _Letton_

This one was a little more chilling, I'll admit. I had no doubt that they were referring to me and Xena in this message. I'd 'fucked up' their plans, as they put it, once before on the Archimedes, and again on the Constantinople. I'd escaped on a cruiseliner, the Andromeda, along with Xena, exactly as it said, though strangely Katie and the kids weren't mentioned. And on top of it all was the most unnerving thing: They wanted me, for something. They'd been trying to find me, to track me down… And perhaps they still were. The 'android' mentioned in the email, that could be the missing KT unit. Then there was this mention of 'Company B'. Could that be the 'new company' that Letton mentioned before? Who else could be in on Weyland-Yutani's plans? Who else was wrapped up in all this? And then it hit me… the disappearances.

The whole reason I'd come here in the first place was to find out more about the disappearances that were still going on all over the ship. I'd come to find out if one particular company was involved. Because the kidnappers wore hazard suits... produced by Kovacs Extrasolar Solutions. Without hesitation, I pulled the keyboard closer again and typed in the letters 'K-O-V-A-C-S'. Within an instant, thousands of matches flooded the screen, filling page after page with results. Just as I suspected. But that wasn't evidence enough. I had to see it with my own eyes. I skipped straight through to the very last page, and scrolled down to the very oldest file. It was dated '2235/08/21', and entitled 'KETC Acquisition'. Wide-eyed, I clicked on the link, knowing full well that this could be the connection that I was looking for. The message read:

 _Letton,_

 _Andover here. I just wanted to let you know that our acquisition of the Kovacs Extrasolar Traction Company is complete. Starting next week, we will officially begin operations under the new title: 'Kovacs Extrasolar Solutions'. Rest assured, research will commence immediately. Of course, as per executive insistence, the takeover will not be made public._

 _You know, if all goes well, we just might be able to pull this off. Weyland-Yutani may be in some pretty hot water right now, but Kovacs is completely off the radar. And 'off the radar' is precisely where we'll need to be if and when it all comes out._

I could hardly believe what I was reading. All of a sudden, it all fell into place, like the pieces of a jigsaw all… well, falling into place. Weyland-Yutani had been preparing for years, way before the Xenomorph breakout on Earth. They knew that they'd eventually be exposed; that the truth would come out and the company would be dismantled. But they were ready for it. They'd bought out Kovacs years earlier, completely in secret, so that they could continue their research unnoticed if Weyland-Yutani itself ever went under. And all of this could only mean one thing. If those people disappearing all over the ship were being kidnapped by Kovacs… then they were being used to continue Weyland-Yutani's Xenomorph research. They were here. Right under our noses, and not a single person knew. There were Xenomorphs on board the Angelica.

I had to get home. I had to tell Xena and Katie, and we had to do something, _anything_ , to stop this. If just two Xenomorphs could cause a planetary infestation, then a whole pack of them could kill everyone on the ship within hours. Hurriedly, I got to my feet, but as I was about to leave, something stopped me. There was something else, one more word that still buzzed around in the back of my mind. Right now, I had access to every single file that Weyland-Yutani had ever created. Every memo, every email… every accident report. If I wanted the truth, this was where I would find it. With a deep sigh, I sat back down at the monitor, wiped the sweat from my palm onto my sleeve, and keyed in the letters 'K-E-L-V-I-N'.

A handful of results popped up on the screen. By the looks of it, most seemed to only mention the name in passing. But one stood out. It was dated '2284/11/01', and simply labelled 'Kelvin'. This was it. I was one click away from finding out the truth. One click away from finding out what really happened. Just one click… And I did it. I clicked it, and a new tab popped up, displaying the email on the screen in full. I still remember those words to this day. This was what it said:

 _Letton,_

 _This is Harrow. It's about Kelvin. That's Biological Technician Sarah Hyacinth Kelvin, though I suspect you're already familiar with the name. She works at the Triton labs, running tests on Xenomorph XX121 specimens. Over the last few weeks her behaviour has been… abnormal, to say the least. She's been getting unusually friendly with one of the creatures in her lab. The specimen itself is physically identical to the others, though if I didn't know any better I'd say it seems to be capable of expressing human-like emotions. If that's the case, then it's a genetic anomaly, and nothing more._

 _Nevertheless, Kelvin won't be swayed. If things carry on, she may start to sympathise. And you and I both know that sympathisers cause trouble. We need to keep this under wraps. We need to make sure that she doesn't put word out about this to anyone. The way I see it, the solution is clear. We get rid of the evidence. Dispose of the specimen, and dispose of her. We'll file an accident report, saying the specimen went rogue and killed her, and was put down as a result. Pending your approval, I'll give the order. Just say the word, and it's done. The story of Sarah H Kelvin will never be told._


End file.
